Una curiosità: in meno di un mese tre scrittori americani hanno pubblicato un libro sul silenzio, o meglio un libro contro il rumore.
George Michelsen Foy ha scritto Zero Decibels. The quest for absolute silence (Scribner).
Garret Keizer ha scritto The unwanted sound of everything we want. A book about noise (PublicAffairs).
E ancora George Prochnik ha scritto In pursuit of silence. Listening for meaning in a world of noise (Doubleday).
Più che una coincidenza, sembra un MANIFESTO: la ricerca di scrittori e lettori di quella dose di silenzio sufficiente ad "ascoltare i propri pensieri".
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Ecco la recensione sui tre libri del New York Times Book Review
NOISES OFF by TED CONOVER
Writers are notoriously noise-averse, perhaps none more so than the historian Thomas Carlyle. “SILENCE, SILENCE: in a thousand senses I proclaim the indispensable worth of Silence, our only safe dwelling-place often,” he wrote a friend in 1840. A few years later, after his neighbor in London’s Chelsea district added a flock of “demon fowl” to his yard, Carlyle resolved to defend himself against the clamor of roosters, organ grinders, the neighbor’s piano, etc., by adding a floor to his house for a sound-proof study. It didn’t work: with certain sounds shut out, others became more audible — distant whistles among them. “The silent room is the noisiest room in the house,” his wife, Jane, observed.
So it might not surprise that a writer has just come out with a book about the problem of noise. But what does it mean that three have done so, within barely a month? Has a sonic tipping point been reached?
I do know that each of these writers had me saying, “I know just what you mean,” within the first few pages. With George Michelsen Foy, it was a moment, described in the first paragraphs of “Zero Decibels,” that took place on the uptown platform of the Broadway local at the 79th Street station. A perfect storm of subway noise enveloped him when all four trains (two express and two local) screamed through the station at the same time. He put his hands over his ears “and screwed my face into the scrunched expression of a root-canal patient. I usually despise people who do that on subway platforms, . . . who cough if someone is smoking across the street, who wear cardigans and bicycle clips; for God’s sake, if you’re so delicate, move to an ashram! But here I was doing the same thing.”
With George Prochnik, it came on the second page of “In Pursuit of Silence,” when he says he has had a “passion for quiet as long as I can remember.” Worried that he’s a borderline “noise crank,” he admits to having “snitched on contractors who started work early” and “battled neighbors who hold large parties.” “My most notorious moment,” he confesses, “occurred when I called our cable company to come check out the volume of sound that the DVR made when it was turned off. I wasn’t home when the cable man showed up, and my wife was forced to try and help him make out the faint clicking projecting from deep inside the machine. (“There can you — there, no — wait, I think that’s it. . . .) It’s an incident I will never live down.” (Reviewer’s confession: I can relate to Prochnik because I did exactly the same thing, for exactly the same reason.)
Garret Keizer waits until Page 11 of his book to tell us about his relationship with noise, but there’s really no conceit here about seeking silence. Rather, “The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want” is a meditation on just that: the unreconciled gap between our desire to do things like fly in airplanes and our misery over how loud the associated racket can be.
(...) Continua su http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/books/review/Conover-t.html
May 20, 2010
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