Length: 2,300 words/10 minutes

As an average gent, I have not spent any time in the limelight which is actually quite nice as it affords me the opportunity to step back, reflect, and observe. Yet this is harder to do when all around is getting noisier. Noise now intrudes into all we do and that means we need to embrace silence whenever we can.

Ah, France—the country that serves as the leading lady of America’s love-hate interest. France is, for good reason, the world’s most popular tourist destination and yet it elicits such powerful emotions from Americans. Remember those television blowhards and politicians who, at the outbreak of the second Gulf War, vowed that they would never set foot on Gallic soil and that they would henceforth call French Fries Freedom Fries? Even if they had never been there they still felt obligated to accuse France and its people of having the temerity to be…. well, to be unlike us! Of course, these same blowhards probably send their children on a foreign study semester in Paris and just happen to have their local wine merchant on speed dial to find out if the first cases of Lafite Rothschild are now in stock.

On the other hand, if one picks up a Pottery Barn catalog, looks at a menu in a trendy restaurant, or watches an airplane depart JFK bound for Paris and bursting with tourists, one sees that Americans hedge quite an admiration for French taste, quality, and style. It is a rather schizophrenic embrace that is characterized, to put it mildly, by extreme highs and lows or emotional issues in today’s pop psychology parlance. Of course, the French themselves do not see it this way and that is the sheer beauty of it. Part of their lovable insouciance is that they frankly do not care—they really don’t. They go on living their lives within that beautiful six-sided country that they call l’hexagon and simply ignore what we think.

While the television blowhards were bloviating about how they would never get near France, I thought that this certainly must be the place for me! Just as Willie Sutton robbed banks because that is where the money was, then if these bores said they wouldn’t be there then then all the better without them n’est pas?. The great German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said (and here I paraphrase) that in learning about another land, language, and culture, we actually end up learning more about ourselves. Goethe thought it pretty cool to see the foreign stuff, but the real benefit comes from what it teaches you about yourself.

Another reason that I knew it was time to get away was that I felt that I was being singled out for persecution with the incessant bleating of that vacuous Hall and Oates song I Can’t Go For That. Maybe it is illegal for that song not to be playing at all times because it seems to be omnipresent. I hear it all the time in a restaurant, in the hardware store, in the doctor’s waiting room. Oh…Oh I can’t go for that—no can do…can’t go for that—no can do with the refrain refraining so many times that I wonder if Dante had this in mind for his description of the ever descending circles of Hell.

I was starting to feel as if I were a figure in a Dr. Seuss book. Perhaps if I ran to a church and hid in the nave or maybe a cave. If I took refuge in the hold of a ship where I could give the music the slip… Note to self: a great business idea would be to launch a reality television program to see if a group of competitors could find one place on the North American continent that was free of songs like this for a single day. The series would surely run for years while the quest was ongoing and would undoubtedly bring in a lot of advertising revenue.

So it was off to France—but where? The country is the size of Texas and as much as I would like to picture myself around the casino tables of the Cote d’Azur with a world-weary stare in my eyes a la James Bond as he pays slight attention to the beautiful woman at his side, I had to admit that even in my younger days this was not exactly me. So instead I went to the Atlantic coast in winter—a region that would never make the pages of Condé Nast or other chic see and be seen jet lag (or is it jet set?) magazines. Modest stuff I know, but why not?

Before setting off, I had been working through a book entitled Doing Our Own Thing – The Degradation of Language and Music by the linguistics professor John McWhorter. Believe me dear reader when I tell you that it really is ok to be a nerdish fogey and to read such books. Fogeyism, being nebbish, and affecting the air of a geek are all seriously underrated and such books are often great reads.

Dr. McWhorter is a dynamic, but reflective, African American scholar who specializes in linguistics—a field that perhaps would make some fall asleep—but he brings the topic to life (see above reference to fogeyism). McWhorter puts forth a wonderful paean to the beauty of English as it was once spoken in the United States while wistfully bemoaning it as a lost art form. He makes a good case and hints broadly that the way we use our voices today, coupled with our modern surroundings has resulted in an almost total loss of silence in our American culture. Worse, most of us have not even recognized its disappearance. It was a good book to read for what was in store for me in Gaul.

Aldous Huxley once said that the greatest challenge of the twentieth century would be silence.

I love this quote and it seems all the more urgent for the twenty-first century as we groan under a heavy load of ever increasing noxious noise. The beleaguered citizen is assaulted from every quarter as he makes his way through the day. Even a place that should be as comforting and restorative as a restaurant now offers no refuge. This is not to say we prefer an icy quiet—quite the contrary! No one plans an evening out on the town surrounded by friends in an atmosphere reminiscent of a mortuary, but is there not a balance for the conviviality and liveliness that we seek?

We all have differing tolerances for the sounds around us, but I challenge the readers to listen for a few days as to how many places do not have some type of sound being beamed directly at them. The astute observer will note how quickly the line is crossed between ambient background noise and intrusive noise.

What we thought of in yesteryear as silence was in fact not a complete absence of all noise (what a boring world that would be!), but rather a comfortable environment where sound would nudge but not intrude—an environment where we would manage sound and not vice versa. Sound should serve to enhance our life not to stress, or even worse, direct it. Think of the pleasantness of the crack of a bat at a baseball game or the different voices in a choir—not Hall and Oates blasting at you at the grocery store after a long day.

Noise has become so omnipresent that we now seem to oddly recognize it more by its absence than its presence. Silence, in turn, has now become something that scares us. The brilliance of Huxley was that he knew that places of silence are not always easy places to be because they demand that we concentrate our faculties instead of having them concentrated for us—a subtle but challenging concept. We have taught ourselves to keep this threat of silence at bay by retreating into a cocoon of noise that we make our constant companion.

Even our voices cannot be excused from this decline, and in many ways, play an active part in it. Just as Dr. McWhorter chronicles the slippage in the art of speaking, we notice that the voice is no longer the mellifluous instrument that it once was. Not only can the volume be extreme, but it is completely without emphasis on timbre, pitch, and tenor – hallmarks of a previous generation of well-bred speakers. Notice what a pleasant surprise it is when we encounter someone with a pleasant or cool voice. This does not mean the speaker has to be formal, quite the opposite, but rather simply one who treats words and voices almost as a musical genre—whether it be jazz, rock, or classical.

Too few families these days place emphasis on the proper development of their children’s voices. Unfortunately as the saying goes, flowers left untended do not a garden make and those characteristics of timbre, tenor, and pitch are sacrificed on the altar of volume. Do we sit down, pull close, and look at our children and speak softly when we chat with them? Do we teach them to communicate or do we rather bark out our words to them hoping they will master the nuances of conversation as if through osmosis? Is it a surprise then when we ask why someone around us in the commuter train, the airport, or in the restaurant is being so loud? Volume is king and is used to trump all else in conversation. A lesson learned early and unfortunately never forgotten.

I have always felt that a loud voice is merely an expression of loneliness or selfishness. People shouting into their cell phones at the airport certainly must be shouting for attention as well are they not? Rather than letting the message carry the weight, these individuals let their voices serve as beacons to draw notice to themselves. Am I guilty of this? To be sure. Many times I have walked the length of an airport terminal deep in conversation on my phone, probably being offensive to others, only to think afterwards that I was doing that very thing I detest.

I admit that I am a bit overly sensitive to voices, but one not need be the bore of the party to realize that they can they can be such a beautiful addition to everyday life. Others look at me oddly when they ask what I think to be the most important quality in a woman and I reply “her voice of course.” Not exactly our culture’s definition of beauty by any stretch.

So what does this have to do with France? Quite a bit actually. Those who criticize France should actually be praising it for the valiant battle it fights on our behalf for what I call “sound civility.” France is an old-school country that does not consider it necessary to constantly bombard visitors with noise in every public place at all times. Dr. Huxley would have been quite at home there. I would have enjoyed meeting him in a Paris café and, perhaps not even saying a word, just enjoying with him the sounds around us and the lack of noise.

In France I ate in restaurants where there was no soundtrack blaring over the loudspeakers—shocking as that might seem. I shopped in grocery stores where I could peaceably roam the aisles with only my thoughts as my companion. I concluded that the French actually enjoy hearing themselves think and that they are on guard to keep out unwanted noise. Quite honestly I felt as if I were a paleontologist tracing some lost and wonderful civilization. Heinrich Schliemann finding the supposed ruins of Troy could not have been happier.

This French appreciation for the spoken word reflects a love of the subtlety and nuance of their language that I wish they could export just as they do crates of lavender, wine, and dried sausages. To be fair there still exists in America pockets of pleasing and enjoyable sounding speech. The lilt of a Southern accent, the long vowels of the Midwest, or the sharp report of New England speech, are still something to savor. These gems however, are constantly under attack and have to fight a battle not to lose ground.

What then can we do? The first suggestion would be to lower our voices. A lower voice adds an intimacy and purpose to our conversation that draws the interlocutor into the moment. It is sort of like lowering the sound and enjoying the melody instead of the beat. Think of your “sound space” and that of others. Is there a need to shout on the phone? Why when modern telephony makes it very easy for the listener to hear you?

Of course the best step is to simply try silence from time to time. Just like with a new workout however, start easy lest one suffer an injury—no radio in the car for a few moments or no television at the dinner table. Take notice of how many sounds are being directed at you instead of for you. After a few days a new world will open up to you. You, just like the runner who is restless to go for a trot, might start to “itch” for your new found environment and prefer silence from time to time. It really is a beautiful sound—just one of many.

I know the world, not just in America, can be a noisy place and of course we don’t want our lives to be a boring ritual that is carried out in silence, but I appreciate the battle the French are fighting. Perhaps even they will eventually lose, but their cause is worthy and I wish we would join their fight. In the meantime, wherever those radio and television blowhards spend their free time, I will take a pass for, to use the words of Hall and Oates, I can’t go for that—no can do.

In the meantime, stay average!

Note 1: The picture at the top is actually from the Netherlands and was taken by the Dutch photographer Martijn van der Nat. You might be wondering why I am using a picture of Holland in an essay about France. Well…it is with great fortune that I stumbled across some of Martijn’s photographic work while searching for an aviation image. This picture, taken at sunrise (it is entitled Tranquil Morning), captures the silence that I so very much enjoy–both on the ground and above it while flying. Perhaps like no other photographer working today, he seems to capture that stunning feeling when you are out walking, it is quiet, and you feel as if the entire planet belongs just to you. You can find more of his work here: https://www.martijnvandernat.nl/