Sometimes you want it loud. Sex, concerts, serious cars, and certain movies—the better these things are, the more they leave your ears ringing at the end. You know it’s over with a woman, Harry Crews wrote, when before sex you daintily get undressed on opposite sides of the bed. (“If it’s love, there’s supposed to be some licking and sucking going on.”) A better definition of when things are wilting, sexually, involves acoustics: There’s no longer any screaming. Music especially needs volume to matter. As with Spinal Tap and Elon Musk’s Teslas, you want to be able to turn it up to eleven. This is one argument for rural living; your twenty-ton thumping won’t rattle anyone’s kitchen except your own. Police should be willing to waive speeding tickets if a driver can prove the song he or she was listening to was bliss—the kind of subwoofer-testing anthem Lester Bangs described as “imperative groin thunder.”
One of the great writers about noise and silence was James Agee, especially in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, his unbuttoned nonfiction classic about tenant farmers in Alabama in the 1930s. Agee wrote in that book about how the most furious of humanity’s expressions are tagged, bagged, and tweezed into a manila folder labeled “art.” His remedy was to seize music back from the folder. Here’s what Agee told his readers: “Get a radio or a phonograph capable of the most extreme loudness possible, and sit down to listen to a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony or of Schubert’s C-Major Symphony. But I don’t mean just sit down and listen. I mean this: Turn it on as loud as you can get it. Then get down on the floor and jam your ear as close into the loudspeaker as you can get it and stay there, breathing as lightly as possible, and not moving, and neither eating nor smoking nor drinking. Concentrate everything you can into your hearing and into your body.” He adds: “Is what you hear pretty? or beautiful? or legal? or acceptable in polite or any other society?” I’m freshly inspired about life whenever I read this passage.
We like noise when it’s on our terms. It’s less pleasing when it’s imposed on us. It can be a form of violence. It also makes me recall a line from See a Little Light, a memoir by Bob Mould, the former Hüsker Dü frontman. While playing with Mould on tour, guitarist Chris Stamey complained about the maniacal volume. “Alex Chilton took this ear,” he told Mould, pointing to one side of his head and then the other, “and you’re not taking this one.” Without loudspeakers, Hitler commented, the Nazis would never have conquered Germany. It’s hard to imagine Gandhi astride a Kawasaki ZX-6R with aftermarket pipes. Regular exposure to bone-crunching noise can cause heart disease as well as hearing loss. It’s a class issue. The wealthy have the means to escape the hubbub; the rest of us must cover our ears with our hands. In a beautiful book titled The Unwanted Sound of Everything, the essayist Garret Keizer drew an interesting link between noise and antisocial behavior in general. “I’d love to see an auditory profile for the childhoods of our most ‘hardened’ criminals, along with complementary data for the attorneys, psychiatrists and judges who prosecuted, diagnosed and sentenced them,” he wrote. “What does ‘hardened’ mean, after all, but a calcifying of some human faculty, and what hardens sooner than a child’s ears?”
Like you, I prize whatever silence I can get. I’m a light sleeper and I need it (or a white-noise app on my phone) to get any rest. When I write, I usually wear earplugs to keep out the low spark of high-heeled espresso machines. Like you, too, I assume, I sometimes scan those self-help pieces about how to inject more quiet into your life. Take deep breaths; have teatime; work on an art project; meditate. That sort of thing isn’t for me. Nor are the silent retreats that a friend of mine, the owner of an indie bookstore, regularly goes on. I’m not a particularly Zen kind of fellow, though I would like to float in a sensory-deprivation tank while on serotonergic psychedelics, like William Hurt in Altered States.
In the months since Donald Trump’s election, as the decibel count has risen everywhere and each push alert on my smartphone has been a fresh blast from hell’s newsroom, I’ve been experimenting with a new way of unplugging: I’ve been watching silent movies. It began as a way to fill some gaps in my film education. I’d never seen, to name just two classics, Nosferatu and The Birth of a Nation all the way through. But it’s become my own kind of Zen ritual. You can’t scan your Twitter feed while watching a silent movie; you’ll miss too much. Silent movies force you to settle in, to keep still, to shut out the rest of the world. The payoffs are large. To witness Buster Keaton in The General with his deadpan face and wild physicality, is to see one of the great performances in American cinema. His face is an American archetype; he looks strangely, at times, like Rick Danko from the Band. Another silent film I can watch again and again is The Passion of Joan of Arc, with Maria Falconetti’s eyes burning holes through your soul. And I’ll make time for anything with Ben Turpin in it. His eyes were naturally crossed and so important to his act that, as Time magazine wrote in 1928, they were insured for $100,000, “payable to his producer, Mack Sennett, if the eyes became normal.”
Sometimes you need to be willing to fight for a bit of silence. I’ve got a neighbor I’ll call Wayne. Wayne hates trees. He cuts down whatever he can, so his land is a bit of militarized desert on an otherwise leafy block. Wayne set off fireworks when Fox News called the election for Trump. Wayne also owns a rattling Harley, which he would tinker with every weekend morning, the snorting blasts stunning birds out of the sky and rattling the fillings in my teeth even when I was out back working in my office. I’m not opposed to loud motorcycles; there’s something Kerouacian about them, and we need the greasy outlaws we have left. But I am opposed to them anywhere but on the open road. If you think this sort of opposition makes you a softy, here’s Keizer’s advice: “Go to a biker encampment on the morning after [a festival] and bang some pots together to test the notion that ‘too loud’ only exists for the straitlaced bourgeoisie. And wear your running shoes.”
One Sunday morning, I confronted Wayne. It was 9:00. He was out in the street, revving his engine, filling the air with blue smoke, making windows rattle for blocks. This took a small amount of valor on my part. Wayne is out of shape but a grizzled hombre and could probably take me in a fight, unless I got him in my patented WWE sleeper hold. I asked him if he had any idea how loud his bike was. I asked him if he knew how many children and old people lived on this block. And so on. By now a little crowd had gathered. Wayne shrugged and went inside. He wasn’t much for words. We never saw his Harley again.
This article appears in the October '17 issue of Esquire. SUBSCRIBE TODAY
