This is part of a series of columns by Michael Enright covering his more than 50 years as a CBC journalist and broadcaster covering Canadian and world news events.
Noise. It’s annoying. It’s everywhere. It’s exhausting, stressful and dangerous.
It keeps our nerves on edge. We can run from it, but we cannot hide.
According to World Health Organization, noise pollution is the second most harmful to people after air pollution. If you live in a big city in Canada, there is no escape. garbage trucks, leaf blowers, pneumatic drills, muscle cars, motorcycles, buses, subways and sirens. It is there when we wake up, following us minute by minute until we fall asleep. Or try to. We are suffocated by noise.
Metro Morning5:49Is it time to ditch the leaf blowers once and for all?
Toronto City Councilor Shelly Carroll is behind a proposal to phase out gas leaf blowers used by city crews.
The WHO guidance for proper sleep is less than 40 decibels of sound outside the bedrooms. 2017 study from Toronto Public Health revealed that 92 percent of Toronto’s population tries to sleep in noise environments above 45 dB.
Globe and Mail columnist Marcus Gee has been fighting noise pollution, especially excessive street noise, for years. In his June column, he wrote about a friend who was awakened at 3:30 a.m. by motorcycles racing each other in a deserted park.
Much of the traffic noise is intentional. Muscle cars and some high-end luxury cars can be equipped special mufflers deliberately designed not to reduce engine noise, but to significantly increase it.
Noise levels in restaurants and bars can be frustrating for many diners. (Hunter Bliss Images/Shutterstock)
For Gee, the demons of noise are cars and motorcycles. For me, it’s the restaurants.
Popular, busy restaurants are predictably noisy. But in addition to the normal noise levels, most restaurants play loud and extremely terrible music.
Toronto media owner Moses Znaimer felt that restaurant noise had become such a modern scourge that in 2011 he launched the Anti-Noise Pollution League, which included user-generated list of quiet restaurants.
The league’s noble efforts do not appear to be noticeably effective.
When I dined out, I carried two sets of business cards, some yellow and some blue. Blue cards are for quiet restaurants without music. The text congratulates the manager and says that I will recommend the establishment to friends. Yellow cards inform management of music eateries that I will tell friends to boycott their restaurant. In years of questioning, I have never met a customer who asked to play music in a restaurant.
How a restaurant solved its noise problem
After receiving a lot of feedback from customers, Nick Politi installed ceiling panels to deaden sound at his Windsor, Ontario restaurant, Nico Taverna. Using the SoundPrint app, Marketplace tested noise levels before and after the change.
The war on noise has a long and storied tradition. In 1921, the English engineer Henry John Spooner insisted on “Anti-Noise Day” or “Day of Silence”. India’s liberator Mahatma Gandhi began the practice of spending every Monday in silence. He would attend required meetings but communicate with a notebook and pen. Florence Nightingale, in the midst of her breastfeeding efforts, referred of unnecessary noise as a “cruel lack of care”.
A new book aims to clinically examine our increasingly noisy world and find a way to find its opposite – silence. Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise, by Justin Zorn and Lee Martz, is both a warning and a prescription. But the authors agree that finding welcoming silence is an uphill battle.
They trace the pursuit of silence back more than 2,500 years to the days of Pythagoras, who urged his students, “Learn to be silent. Let your quiet mind listen and absorb.” For Pythagoras, silence is the key to wisdom.
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.- Blaise Pascal
But in the noise of the 21st century, we fear silence. We are afraid to just keep quiet. We need constant stimuli to prove something to ourselves; maybe that we are alive and not alone. Fear of silence is fear of the unknown. Perhaps the 17th century philosopher Blaise Pascal was right when he said, “All the problems of mankind arise from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
Zorn and Martz explore the taxonomy of noise through three categories: auditory noise (eg, cars and trucks), internal noise, and informational noise—the constant flooding of our consciousness with meaningless information. It’s the noise of texting, emailing and social media.
I have been chasing the golden fleece of silence for decades and have failed most of the times. I have even tried the so-calledDigital Saturday” when I turn off screens and phones from sundown Friday night to sundown Saturday.
The Current11:45 This man vowed to shut down the internet for all of 2020. Then the pandemic hit
McGill University doctoral student Aaron Rosenberg in January began a personal project to give up all Internet use for an entire year. Then the pandemic hit. He talks about his reasons for flipping the switch and what he’s learned — about our collective reliance on the Internet and about himself — in the months since.
My Island of Silence and Sanity travels to the village of Weston in the Green Mountains of Vermont and visits the Benedictine monks of Weston Monastery. Before COVID-19, I would spend a week at the monastery, usually in the fall, without a phone or computer or any unnecessary contact with the outside world.
The food is taken in silence. There is complete silence in the dormitories. I’ve never tried it for more than a week. Someday I will. And I will continue to look for other islands of silence.
In a crazy and noisy world, I don’t think we have any other choice.
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