“Silence is the sleep that nour­ish­es wis­dom.” The chances of enjoy­ing that 16^th cen­tu­ry insight from philoso­pher Fran­cis Bacon are slim to nil in today’s world. But a lit­tle more peace and qui­et would go some way to starv­ing the igno­rance with which soci­ety is  pro­gres­sive­ly bloating.
Not only is there too much noise of every kind, many peo­ple seem to find it not just tol­er­a­ble, but nec­es­sary. Sure­ly the  need for “per­son­al  space” should also include silence, or as close as we can come to it, anyway.

As not­ed ad nau­se­um, my pre­ferred way of escap­ing the dis­cor­dance of mod­ern life is pad­dling a kayak, which isn’t everyone’s idea of fun, nev­er mind a necessity.
Ear­ly one morn­ing, drift­ing below a cliff face, lis­ten­ing to a pair of osprey chicks call­ing for their par­ents to return with food, the only oth­er per­son on the lake pad­dled towards me, removed a pair of high-end ear buds and asked me what I was lis­ten­ing to. He’d nev­er heard osprey before and had no idea what they were,  because he  pad­dled to music. If it’s sooth­ing, I can, up to a point, under­stand that.
What I can­not come to grips with is peo­ple who look for relief from oth­er people’s noise by  turn­ing up the vol­ume in their ears so high, any­one with­in a radius of six feet can thump along with it.
That’s the “per­son­al enjoy­ment” equiv­a­lent of an even worse audi­to­ry sin, broad­cast­ing every utter­ance of polit­i­cal office-seek­ers with nei­ther the rhetor­i­cal skills nor the poli­cies to mer­it being heard.
The media has the means to keep the vol­ume at a rea­son­able lev­el. Instead they pro­vide the equiv­a­lent of  the myth­i­cal “11” amp set­ting in “This Is Spinal Tap”, the now clas­sic 1984 mock­u­men­tary about the loud­est band in the world.
Main­stream media out­lets fall over them­selves to main­tain the “prin­ci­ple” that  politician’s claims must be report­ed in the name of fair­ness and inform­ing the pub­lic of what their  wan­na-be and puta­tive lead­ers claim. Fine. But if a state­ment is untrue, or con­tra­dicts what the blowhard said in the past, doesn’t fair­ness to the pub­lic oblig­ate point­ing that out immediately?
Un-caveat­ed dis­sem­i­nat­ing of what­ev­er cam­paign­ing politi­cians blurt and blat when­ev­er they encounter an audi­ence or  a micro­phone, is the tri­umph of noise and non­sense over wit and wisdom.

                A PAUCITY OF OPTIONS

Of course we can turn the news off and ignore the whole process. It wouldn’t be silence,  but it sure would be men­tal­ly more peace­ful. How­ev­er, it would also be abro­gat­ing civic duty, to say noth­ing of maybe mak­ing the wrong choice when the chance to exer­cise the time-hon­oured polit­i­cal sen­ti­ment “throw the bums out”, comes along. The like­li­hood of the next lot being much bet­ter is, I con­cede, dim at best. Giv­ing them anoth­er turn at bat is how­ev­er, an even worse option.
It’s on a par with believ­ing noi­some “real­i­ty” shows are real, which requires ignor­ing the real­i­ty that there’s at min­i­mum a cam­era crew, direc­tor,  light­ing tech, gaffers, hair and make-up artists on hand, which is a far cry from any­thing remote­ly resem­bling reality.
The hell of it, as a sim­ple sage I once knew used to pref­ace sum­ming up any­thing he con­sid­ered unto­ward, was deft­ly summed up by Bob Dylan in “All Along the Watch­tow­er”: “There’s too much con­fu­sion here/I can’t get no relief.”
In that regard, I’ve come to envy the herons who live along the shore­line here.

When one  swooped in front of me because I dis­turbed him, I took it to be a well-deserved ver­sion of the bird equiv­a­lent of flip­ping me the bird. (Ear­li­er this year a Cana­di­an judge recent­ly ruled the ges­ture “a God-giv­en right”.)
 

It also ought to be a right to shop with­out being aural­ly mugged. It’s cer­tain­ly sensible.
As far back as the 1980s stud­ies found that “super­mar­ket sales went up by 38% when stores played slow music instead of fast music.”
What a treat it would be if stores  heed­ed that, instead of blar­ing music only teenagers can love out of what often seem to be 1960s qual­i­ty speakers.
In a store where the “music” was so offen­sive­ly loud it made thought­ful con­sid­er­a­tion of pur­chas­es impos­si­ble, the man­ag­er to whom I com­plained said; “My staff likes it.”
“In that case,” I said, “I hope they spend a lot of mon­ey here, because I intend­ed to,  but I’m out of here.” He didn’t seem to get the point.
Sev­en­ty-five years ago the late Swiss writer and philoso­pher Max Picard con­clud­ed that: “Noth­ing has changed the nature of man so much as silence.”
Like most annoy­ing or unnec­es­sary things, it has done so for the worst. and the vol­ume just keeps going up.

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