Saturday, April 14, 2007

I'm sitting at my favorite cafe having my lunch break. They usually play pretty good music, and the volume is always just right, so it's present but not intrusive. I remember one time the CD player had been skipping for about 5 minutes before anyone really noticed, but by that time I was going insane from it...
Anyway, today there was nothing for a solid 5-7 minutes. It was spectacular. The cafe was filled with sounds of the bus going by outside, a teaspoon stirring cream in coffee, a knife on a cutting board as the server made a sandwich, the screams of the espresso machine - those things which I call true silence.
I love silence, but not emptiness of sound. I think the reason people want music to be playing the background is that they crave/rely on the regularity of rhythm in music. For me, I love the irregularity of natural (as natural as things can be in the modern world) sounds. I am excited by not knowing when sounds are going to happen, I think it makes me more aware and involved with how time passes for me.
Anyway, I won't get too deep, but I love silence!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Silence is the niose of lonliness

Michael Park said...

From the spelling, I'll assume this is the writing of Drunky McSoused Pants, but actually, in the situation I described, each individual in the cafe was actually more in tune with those around them. And I'm really not sure that loneliness can really be warded off by an audio recording or whatever is on the radio. That's like saying Valentino can substitute for a real man...