The pall of volcanic ash currently floating over western Europe is rough on jet turbines but good for people living near airports.
These are people who day in, day out, have to put up with harmful levels of noise as Airbuses and Boeings and other aircraft thunder off and onto runways, over the roofs of their houses, every ninety seconds or so.
Yesterday NPR interviewed a couple of women who live in west London, near Heathrow, Europe's busiest jetport. They spoke of being able to get a full night's sleep for the first time in years, thanks to the ash being spewed out by a volcano in Iceland.
They spoke of being able, for once, to look forward to coming home after work to an environment that was quieter than the one they had left.
Studies of people living near Schiphol Airport, in Amsterdam, have shown higher levels of treatment for cardiac problems than people who do not have to put up with aircraft noise.
One of the London interviewees, interestingly, mentioned the "eerieness" of the silence when Heathrow shut down operations. This is the same kind of feeling city dwellers experience when they spend a night in the country--a sense that when the noise they are accustomed to stops it means trouble. Things are not right, the machines are not working. Danger.
City people often have trouble sleeping when they first go to bed in the country. After a night or two, of course, they come to treasure the silence.
This feeling of eerieness is important. The dependence on noise it implies shows not only how pervasive harmful sound levels have become in our "evolved" societies, but also to what extent we are conditioned to accept them.
I spent a year researching a book on silence and noise, and I was constantly amazed by the extent to which people simply did not think about such issues. "Oh," they'd comment, when I told them what I was writing about, "how interesting." The blank look on their faces said it all.
They had no clue that most of them were living in the auditory equivalent of a war zone. Not defining the problem--not even realizing there was a problem--they consequently did not realize they could do something to solve or at least attenuate it.
But just as it's possible to leave a real war zone to live peacably in a place free of bombs and machine-guns, it is feasible to leave the battlefield of noise for an environment where sound levels are humane and we are not under stress.
I will cover some of these escape strategies in my next post. And I should confess, here, that I promised to discuss ways to counteract noise several posts ago, and did not fulfill my promise. I could plead busy-ness; I could argue that more important subjects came up in the meantime.
What I would really be saying, though, is that I was not listening to the lessons I am supposed to teach; that I was bamboozled by the excess levels of communications noise in my own life, which caused me to go back on a promise to readers. And that, quite honestly, would be the truth.
Beware the alleged "teacher" who does not practice what he prescribes.
