da: The New York Times
Writers are notoriously noise-averse, perhaps none more so than the historian Thomas Carlyle. “SILENCE, SILENCE: in a thousand senses I proclaim the indispensable worth of Silence, our only safe dwelling-place often,” he wrote a friend in 1840. A few years later, after his neighbor in London’s Chelsea district added a flock of “demon fowl” to his yard, Carlyle resolved to defend himself against the clamor of roosters, organ grinders, the neighbor’s piano, etc., by adding a floor to his house for a sound-proof study. It didn’t work: with certain sounds shut out, others became more audible — distant whistles among them. “The silent room is the noisiest room in the house,” his wife, Jane, observed. So it might not surprise that a writer has just come out with a book about the problem of noise. But what does it mean that three have done so, within barely a month? Has a sonic tipping point been reached?
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