The Paradox Of Silence

As one lays awake in bed during those last few moments of consciousness before the day’s end, slurred and input ridden brains trembling with equations and observations, only one of our senses still has a significant presence. Our sight is blanketed, our flesh wrapped in warm comfort, and our nose filled with the sedating scent of sleep and fresh linen. Only our ears continue to remain open and sensitive, and what comforts our ears tends to vary from individual to individual, unlike the other four, which are generally constant.

I discovered the beauty of drowning in white noise the first summer after I left home, and can still remember it’s initial impression, despite the numbing effects of routine. The impression, of course, isn’t limited to the simple sound of the roaring box fan in the window, nor the click-clack of the wind tossed blinds tapping the window frame. It extends beyond audio, and into the surreal. Awaking to a sense of youthful excitement, the air thick with summer humidity and nostalgic distortion. Soft spring-like colors, and a sense of optimistic gentleness pervade. It is, in fact, the most prominent memory that comes to mind when I summon images of the time in my life when I was eighteen years old. Humidity, roaring box fans, and tapping window blinds… laziness, carelessness, and tranquility. In the most romantic and distorted fashion such things could be observed, of course.

I found myself contemplating this while struggling through a fever to find sleep, and although I would have rather avoided diving deeper into the neglected memories of details long past, I couldn’t help but travel anywhere else. I drifted in darkness past my stay in the city, the sounds of a cheap motel air conditioner and distant train whistles, I floated through my past perspectives in a Billy Pilgrim sort of insanity, and found my awaiting-sleep perspective in that motel room simultaneously looking at myself in the future, and in the past. I followed his left eye farther into the past, and into the dark sounds of my first bedroom; a sporadic and cool spring breeze through the screened window near my bed, the scent of water, ozone, and midnight greens, with the occasional sound of wet tires on the street from some unnamed late night traveler.

All of these tiny nuances stand out so prominently in retrospect, surrounded by silence and the peace of the night. Without white noise even the smallest of noises seem to scream, yet when the world is constantly screaming through perpetual noise, not even the SLAM SLAM SLAM of the broken door downstairs can be heard through it. Therefore I argue that white noise is a purer form of silence than silence itself.