it's not only a journey of sight and mind, it's also one of sound
2001 11 28
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I can set my clock by the noises I hear.
The sprinkler on the lawn across the road in summer, means it's 3:35 a.m. precisely. The whooshing breath of the neighbour's dog, means that it's 6 a.m. on the dot. The overly loud television sounds from downstairs, means that it's past 6 p.m. on the weekends.
I don't know that people pay all that much attention to the ambient noises in their lives; those noises blend into the background so easily. They melt in, and we stop noticing them after a while. Sometimes we only notice the absence of them, too.
When I first moved into this flat, I stopped hearing the trains, and missed them. I missed the rumble of thousands of tonnes of heavy metal scraping across tracks, the whistles as they crossed streets. It was a small hole in my day that took a long while to get filled in with some other noise that I now no longer notice; some other sound that's lost its meaning amidst the conglomeration of other sounds that bury it.
Some mornings, it's interesting to sit and listen to the world waking up around you. One sound, then another, then a few more. They're like layers of icing on a cake. Too many, as I said, can bury the flavour of the cake underneath.
One layer, then another, then another still. They build.
I can't sleep in dead silence. I remember once during highschool I slept over at a friend's. At the time she lived in what I'll term "the middle of nowhere". I was so used to the noises of major streets and inner cities, that being out there in the dead of night was near numbing. There was nothing; no sound at all. Not even her dog barked or made noise. It took me ages to fall asleep in the wasteland of deadness that pressed around me in the dark.
Some morning, if you can, sit in silence before dawn and listen to the world wake up around you. Listen as the layers of icing on the cake coalesce to form a day.
What do you hear?