Till noise do us apart
Ela’s column appeared in 7sky Magazine, Issue #86 «Silence»
Thanks to a study published by the WHO last spring, I know now that noise represents the second greatest health hazard amongst environmental factors. Every night, 20% of the European population sleeps exposed to 65 decibels, which corresponds to the sound volume of a television. Sleeping to a television?! Yeah… Not cool! Furthermore, during daytime, an inhabitant of Zurich is constantly exposed on an average sound volume of 50 decibels, which again corresponds to the volume of a normal conversation. Sounds enormously annoying? Well, it exceeds also the WHO recommendations by 15%.
Knowing all this, I’m no longer surprised that my cool-urban friends and I have quite an uneasy relationship to both noise and silence. The following three examples shall show what I mean. Firstly, I cannot imagine leaving the house without my iPod. My ears need music, everywhere, all the time. Yet, an MP3 player can generate an acoustic charge of 120 decibels, which is the equivalent of a jet plane passing. Of course, I am not stupid enough to listen to my music at max volume, but still, I need music in my ears, or apparently just anything that resembles the passing of a jet plane.
Ela wearing the White Water Dress. Photo by Iouri Podladtchikov.
Secondly, I like living in the city, but actually, I am more in sync with nature and I genuinely appreciate silence. Chances are here that one day, I will pack my suitcases, move to a deserted island and start a little goat farm. I was recently talking about these plans with a hip acquaintance of mine who looked at me quite funny and said that she most definitely would be scared of the amount of silence that could be found on a deserted goat farm. Which brings us directly to our third example. I have noticed in both my fellow human beings and myself a sincere rejection attitude towards silence every Friday night. Why? Well, Friday night is the time when we either pee our pants because we haven’t made any plans for the weekend yet, or we have already successfully identified ourselves as pitiable victims of an ‘enormously stressful week’ that really need to switch off their brains by getting wasted in some night club. In such a night club, the sound level can reach up to 100 decibels. This corresponds to a reputed machine called jackhammer, which stands in particular for ‘switching off’… Aha!
In ‘The Age of Absurdity’ (my current favorite book), Michael Foley (my current favorite author) mocks exactly at our strange relationship to silence. He describes our generation as a voyeuristic kind that finds its raison d’être in life through company, conversation and noise. I must say that it does sound reasonable to me that our constant subjection to noise on one hand makes us completely incapable of handling silence on the other. To teach it to ourselves anew, we unite once a week in a yoga lesson and celebrate in a group the kind of silence we cannot find by ourselves anymore. The cost: 35 bucks. Easy. But kind of expensive in the long run. To not have a whole generation wake up bankrupt one day, the Federal Office for Health should seriously consider a half-hour of silence training per day as mandatory for my fellow hipsters and me.
In order to improve my own silence ability, I have already come up with diverse training methods. In one of them, I force all the people I meet to undergo a moment of silence with me. Amazing! Firstly, it’s a very efficient way to improve my ability to stand silence, and secondly an amazingly intimate pastime that shows immediately whether I am compatible with the other person or not. If the silence becomes unbearable, the person isn’t made for me, I can guarantee this much. The success rate of this method is actually captivating. I already found my future husband with it. Maybe you know him? His name is Ryan Gosling. Since three weeks, everyday, I spend half an hour in company with his naked upper body on wallpaper, completely silent. It works so well between us that I accepted frenetically nodding when he proposed to me the other day. The wedding will take place next summer and you are all invited… Till noise do us apart.
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