A Life Less Urbanary

On Hearing and Taming the Voices in Your Head

And I like my music like I like my life:
Everything louder than everything else
—Jim Steinman

The Silence and the Fog

On the first day of moving, I emptied an over-stuffed apartment and started packing the truck.

On the second day of moving, I slept in a closet while my partner did the deep clean, broke her wrist falling off the truck, and then vacuumed the apartment with a broken wrist because we were under the gun. That night we slept in the moving truck in a Wal-Mart parking lot hundreds of miles along the road.

On the third day of moving, we helped a guy at a gas station who was having a heart attack, ripped the hose off of a pump at another gas station, rolled up to our new ramshackle beach apartment, and unloaded the truck into the living room. We were frantic—the truck had to be returned in the morning, and the depot was nearly a hundred miles away.

Halfway through the unload, she crashed out on the bare mattress in the living room amid a sprawl of boxes. The pain and exhaustion had gotten to her, there was no rousing her, and I didn’t have the heart to try anyway. I left her on the mattress and proceeded, with the dolly, to finish the unloading.

The fog was in, so thick that every light was a halo.

The kind of fog that swallows every sound in the world.

The nearby highway ran behind a short hillock which made it nearly inaudible at normal times. Now its sound was gone.

The pounding of the waves on the shore, only a couple hundred feet away, was almost inaudible in the mist.

A strange terror shot through me. I looked around at the shadows, but I didn’t see any deeper shade lurking within them.

For the next two hours, I unloaded the rest of the truck and quietly set my boxes down around my sleeping companion. But the silence, per se, didn’t last long. I popped my headphones in and played an audiobook...because I’d never heard such a loud silence.

I would have forgotten about that part, if I hadn’t been reminded of it so many times since.

The Sound of Silent Neighborhoods

During the next few weeks after I finished that move (which took multiple trips) and the family settled into its new digs, I spent most of my time walking on the beach and through the neighborhoods of the off-season tourist town. The only internet we had for a few weeks came over the phone, and it wasn’t all that impressive bandwidth-wise. I spent my time writing my ass off, sometimes with a lecture or audiobook running in the background, sometimes with music, but just as often I wrote with the windows open, listening to the surf.

It was quite a transition.

Before I’d left the Bay Area I’d had a regular writing date with my friend Gail Carriger, where we’d seek out busy coffee shops and do competitive writing sessions, riding on the energy and throb of the cafe. I had to seek that kind of stimulation out because I lived in quiet neighborhoods in one of the sleepier towns around the Bay.

In the small coastal town to which I’d moved, I didn’t have access to much intense sociality. I had to content myself with the dynamic weather, the crash of the waves, and the joking in the household.

A month later, I found myself needing to make a run back to my original hometown to finish out a couple service contracts that I wasn’t able to wrap up before I’d moved away. A couple hours after arriving at the house where I was staying, situated in an exceptionally quiet neighborhood high in the Bay Area hills, I sat on the bench in the house’s back yard, and shook.

Even up in those quiet hills, the noise was so intense, so loud, that I couldn’t believe I’d ever managed to record audiobooks, or write, or sleep in the little suburb where I’d spent the previous 25 years of my life.

I’ve been back to the big city a few times since then, and, knowing what to expect, I’ve coped fairly well.

But I’ve never moved back.

More interesting, though, is what happens when people visit the rural places where I’ve since made my home in recent years.

Silence is Predatory

In all of the rural places I’ve lived, the scenario is the same:

A visitor slides in front of the house in a car.

He or she steps out, takes in the nature that they’re suddenly surrounded by, hugs hello, and then looks around again and a puzzled expression blooms. The next words out of their mouth are invariably:
“Wow. It’s so quiet!”

Over the next few hours, not an hour passes where they don’t again express their shock at how quiet everything is.

Even in all the rural places, you can’t completely escape the noise of engines or people. Vehicles trundle along the dirt roads. Neighbors—usually more than a quarter mile away—work in their shops or run their tractors.

And, of course, there are the sounds of nature. Birds—both wild and domestic—can be right bastards when it comes to raising an unholy racket. Dogs bark at deer and bears and other critters both benign and dangerous.

And yet, the observation comes again and again:

“It’s so quiet here!”

And, the first night, most of them sleep pretty well.

The problems come on day two.

On day two, no matter how good the conversation is, no matter how enjoyable the hiking and swimming and projects and farm activities are, the quiet is no longer wholly pleasant.

The silence works its way inside, and they begin to hear the voices inside their own heads.

Voices they’ve drowned out with constant media blasts.

Voices that lurk below the surface of the urban and suburban din.

Voices that they don’t want to hear.

Not many people make it through an entire visit without finding a constant source of noise.

Those that do have trouble sitting still.

And some of them can’t cope. They find a sudden, irrepressible need to return to the hustle-and-bustle before their own thoughts drive them mad.

When I found the silence, I had books to write. There was somewhere I could pour out the voices in my head, and in a relatively short time, I made them part of myself once again.

The Tragedy of Fragmentation

Out here in the wildlands, there’s always something to do, but the relative urgency is usually low.

Down there in the big city, or the small town, where labor-saving devices and social fragmentation leave people so often at loose ends, there’s often nothing to do, and humans are very bad at having nothing to do. Purposeless gnaws at us, and one of the best ways to mask the deep well of listlessness is to cover it with noise.

Some breaks are nice, of course. Quiet corners for daily meditations. Walks in the park. Coffee on the back porch with a good book.

But even inside a soundproof recording booth in the city, there is always noise. Droning, low, often just below the perceptual threshold because we’ve learned to gate it out, it is nonetheless there, providing a constant source of nervous energy, and constant impetus to do something.

And when there is nothing to do, then goddammit we will find something to do.

A show to watch.

Music to blast.

Doomscrolling that must be done in order to keep up with what’s going on in the world—the modern-day version of the Boomer who keeps CNN or Fox News or the local News-Talk radio station running constantly and forever in the background.

It must be done, because the alternative is worse.

Because when the silence comes, you’re never alone.

You are, instead, surrounded by the choir of inchoate voices in your head.

And facing one’s own internal choir is more terrifying than almost anything else in the universe.

The deafening silence drives the day-trippers back to civilization, into the comforting arms of the din, where life feels sensible because it can’t make sense when it’s untethered and awash in activity, and bustle, and noise.

And beneath it all lurks a tragedy, almost impossible to communicate:

If only they could stand the silence.

If only they could drink in the day.

If only they could hear the music that the voices in their heads play!

For once you learn the choir’s song, and accept it as part of yourself, once you lift up your voice in harmony with it, you can no longer feel trapped and lonely.

Instead, you discover a state of being that the great voices of history have long lauded:

Solitude.

And, with delicious irony you find that the solitary man, or woman, who is fully themselves is better suited to fully connect with others than is a mind tossed and tumbled by the cacophony of noise.

---

If you enjoyed this post, you may also want to check out my Unfolding the World series, a history of the current geopolitical storm rocking our world, its roots, and its possible outcomes.

When not haunting your Substack client, I write novels, literary studies, and how-to books. You can find everything currently in print here, and if you’re feeling adventurous click here to find a ridiculous number of fiction and nonfiction podcasts for which I will eventually have to accept responsibility.

This is a big part of how I make my living. If you’re finding these articles valuable, please kick some cash into the offering plate!