By George Prochnik
More than funds, strength, or even happiness, silence has turn into the main precious—and dwindling—commodity of our smooth world.
Between iPods, music-blasting eating places, earsplitting activities stadiums, and never-ending air and highway site visitors, where for quiet in our lives grows smaller through the day. In Pursuit of Silence offers context to our more and more desperate sense that noise pollutants is, in a really possible way, an environmental catastrophe. hearing medical professionals, neuroscientists, acoustical engineers, priests, activists, educators, agents, and aggrieved electorate, George Prochnik examines why we started to be so loud as a society, and what it truly is that will get misplaced after we can not locate quiet. He exhibits us some great benefits of decluttering our sonic world.
As Prochnik travels around the usa and in a foreign country, we meet a wealthy host of characters: an idealistic architect who's pioneering a brand new form of silent structure in collaboration with the Deaf group at Gallaudet collage; a different operations soldier in Afghanistan (and former guitarist with Nirvana) who areas silence on the middle of survival in battle; a legitimate fashion designer for purchasing department shops who guarantees that the shops we stopover at by no means cease their auditory seductions; and a bunch of commuters who effectively revolted opposed to piped-in song in Grand important Station.
A very good, far-reaching exploration of the frontiers of noise and silence, and the turning out to be battle among them, In Pursuit of Silence is a vital publication that might entice lovers of Michael Pollan and Daniel Gilbert.
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Additional resources for In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise
Example text
Henry David Thoreau writes in his account of a voyage he took on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers that all sounds are, ultimately, servants and purveyors of silence. ” This idea of a nourishing contrast works two ways. Just as certain sounds can throw the silence enfolding us into high relief, silences mold sound. In another expedition I made near the outset of my journey, this time to a laboratory, I saw how the current of silence flowing beneath our utterances enables us to segment what we hear into meaningful speech.
The pursuit of silence, likewise, is dissimilar from most other pursuits in that it generally begins with a surrender of the chase, the abandonment of efforts to impose our will and vision on the world. Not only is it about standing still; with rare exceptions, the pursuit of silence seems initially to involve a step backward from the tussle of life. The different stories that first drove home to me what the engagement with silence could bring were centered on a kind of listening that only occurs after a break in the circuit of busyness.
How he managed to eat enough to survive without swallowing the rock is a matter about which the chronicles remain silent. ” The parable suggests some of the great questions surrounding silence: How much does our pursuit of silence require us to withdraw from the world? To what extent is silence experiential in a manner that can be neither explained nor conveyed? To what degree must we remain literally still in order to experience the truths of silence? All of us have intuitive formulas for gauging the point at which silence has been attained.