A friend of mine recently asked an Italian writer who had
moved from Italy to the West Coast of Scotland why he had
made this rather unusual move. “In Italy,” he replied,
“silence is very expensive. In Scotland, it is very cheap.”
Not everyone, by any means, is willing or able to live in a
wilderness, however beautiful and romantic, in order to
escape noise; yet for those who are sensitive to it, noise
is one of the torments of modern life. Short of staying at
home in a cork-lined room, it is difficult to avoid it; and
while some of it is the price we have to pay for a
materially abundant life, much of it is not, but seems to be
generated for its own sake.
How difficult it is to find the balm of silence in the
modern world was borne in on me the other day in a
provincial English city. I was a little early for an
appointment and, having work to do, sought a silent place in
which to do it. I might as well have sought the end of the
rainbow. After trying several cafes in search of silence, I
decided to go into a bookshop, one of a chain that has a
near monopoly.
A bookshop, one might have supposed, would of
all places be silent, but one would have
been mistaken. Utterly tuneless rock music, its words
intoned by an angry young monomaniac, gave to the head the
