I can see how isolation, if it isn't by choice, could be completely destructive to someone.

By and large, I can't write to music. Plainsong was the one exception; Suzanne Vega's Solitude Standing was on my headphones a lot, especially since one of the Magi in the book is the nymph Calypso, and there's a brilliant song on the CD about her.

But my question had more to do with whether people disliked being alone with their own thoughts, or the feeling that humanity had somehow receded away from them, when things were genuinely silent.

When I was younger, I had to have noise to work. I couldn't study in the library, for example. Now I have to have silence, unless I'm doing something mindless like filing. I don't know if I'm more comfortable with my own thoughts or I've just lost enough brain cells that I can't focus with additional sensory input.

Chosen noise helps me be alone with my thoughts. The wandering parts of my brain are all attracted to the music, and I'm left with the easy ability to focus on what I want.

Unless it's hard, silence doesn't help.

Hubby is one of those who turns the TV on as soon as he's home, even if he's at the other end of the apartment. Grr.

Stillness, that's a good thing. I love big churches. I'm not Christian any longer, but the sense of presence, waiting, listening, it's very lovely.

Sounds (heh) like a little bit of heaven to me, Deb. Birdsong, wind through the trees, ripple of wash at the lakeshore, rain. I used to play those nature sounds tapes in my office, and people would laugh at me. But it was one way I managed to keep some focus and get work done, despite the social-gregarious chatter and laughter going on around me. No walls, no door.

People look at me blankly now when I complain about the neighbor kids shrieking in the wading pool, the weedwhacker two doors over, the fact that not a single weekend or holiday that's sunny goes by without the neighbors firing up the lawnmower, tractor, chainsaw, weedwhacker. Or working on the car or the motorcycle in the driveway, adjusting the choke or whatever, revving the engine. Or the next door neighbor running 30 gallons of water through the boat's outboard to clean the lakewater out of it. Or the radio blasting while the teenager down the street washes his car in the driveway, the cookout across the street, with four generations gathered, adults trying to talk over each other and yelling at the kids running, falling, crying, arguing, while beach music pumps and burned meat smoke drifts my way.

These are just neighborly sounds and sights and smells. We have a big yard, lots of distance between houses, and it's not enough. We've been in the landing and takeoff pattern for two airports for a long time, and air traffic has steadily increased in volume--both numbers and noise. In the last eight years they've bult a new Interstate bypass less than a mile and a half away, as the crow flies, and the traffic roar is steady, constant. It makes me cranky, and long for a place far enough away from civilization that I can actually hear silence. By the time I'm able to sell this place and move, my greatest fear is that there won't be any such place left that's both isolated enough for silence, and close enough to the amenities of civilization.

For me, I can deal with a thousand birds singing, or the wind slamming into the side of the house, or (yes yes yes) waves outside my door, and it's all a kind of silence. Also, with the big cathedrals - if I can be there when there aren't a bazillion tourists (I always go to Notre Dame and light a candle to celebrate the Liberation of Paris, when I'm there), I just bask in the quiet. There's something amazing about being in a plce that's been a focus for that much energy for so long, even if I don't share the energy source. Put me near standing stones, and I'm totally into it.

I think it's the human-generated noise that makes me nuts, when I want silence for my own soul. People talking is the worst, then radios. Ugh.

"I like the quiet."

I like silence just fine.

For me, quiet is noticing which noises have stopped -- the HVAC fan, the refrigerator compressor, that damned mockingbird who likes to serenade at 2 a.m.

that damned mockingbird who likes to serenade at 2 a.m.

OH! You've reminded me of something I wrote at about age twenty, back when the earth was still cooling and glam rockers roamed the earth.

And on topic - this week's topic - no less!

My piano player once told me I couldn't be a poet unless I wrote an ode to a skylark.

So I did. Burned into my memory circuits, because he nearly choked to death laughing:

Harken, skylark in the tree
singing there so loud and free
singing as I mutter "Dirty
fucking bird, it's SEVEN THIRTY!
I did not get in 'til three!"

Harken, skylark in the tree
singing there so loud and free
singing loud as any sparrow
I will shoot you with my arrow
Then, perhaps, will silence be.

Hee!

I find that it really relates to my emotional state. If I'm agitated, or avoidy, silence drives me bonkers. I need a cd or the tv or something other than ambient noise, because my thoughts are unsettling.

When I'm relatively well balanced, and confident, silence is a companion.