My Neighbors Went To Sleep

Thoughts on Balance and Silence

Just a bit ago, my neighbors across the alley turned off their TV which they blast like they’re in a movie theater. Their near incessant coughing and bickering, at times loving and not, had disappeared and the air outside filled with quiet. With their lights turned off, the street serendipitously became quiet, not a car passing through. I can’t even hear a car flooring it down International just a couple blocks away.

Outside I can hear the train. Slightly in the distance the 580 moans endlessly. There is a faint breeze and some sirens further out. Something above sounds like a plane. My neighbor in the building has arrived home and they walk up the stairs, soft yet stomping. A clock in my kitchen moves loudly with its metronome. Every one of these sounds, in some sense, has a breath to it. Some soft pause and release. That's the only way I can think of these noises.

This quiet is peaceful, releasing. Something often I don’t get the pleasure to sit with. And yet, here in Oakland like any city, this silence is so finite.

I remember, two years ago, driving back home from a trip to Nevada, I pulled over on a quiet and secluded dirt road near Tahoe to sleep. After making dinner and going for a short wander to reach any view I could of the sunset, laying alone and fatigued in my sleeping bag, I was unable to go to bed on account of my shock of how quiet it was—how everything around me seemed to disappear into this silence and become consumed by it.

This often happens to me. When it’s late and I’m in a place where things will become so quiet that anything at all sounds loud. Even as a very young kid, I heard this overwhelming silence as I went to sleep on extremely quiet nights. Sometimes, I would worry I was going deaf. It seems as if silence, or quiet, became so omnipresent in those moments that I tried to make sense of how little I could hear going on. It reminds me of how we often, looking at clouds or abstract paintings, become engrossed, not in the beauty or wonder of the shapes, colors, and lines, but in the naming of what those things could be. Searching for Yoda in a cumulus cloud, or a dog in a sharp brown gesture. Silence, or quiet, is not the absence of sounds since we can literally never know that experience, but a kind of confusion within the faintness of sound itself.

Those moments of almost absolute quiet sometimes are too much for me. I can’t have that level of quiet all the time. The quiet itself is too distracting. But, in a city, the sound just consumes reality and, similar to silence, I begin to feel myself overwhelmed by the incessant presence of machinery. In a city there is always something. 

This something has major effects on, not just our human health, but the health of many other animals that living in urban environments with us. Sounds, even in the ocean, harm wildlife. Notably, in the open ocean the sounds of ships interferes with echolocation which are necessary to dolphin and whales’ survival.

At this point, I’m so accustomed to the drone of all these human noises that I only notice that it’s loud when I’m out at a bar or restaurant or show, or on any street in Oakland, but especially MLK. The sounds then are literally consuming the air. And it's only in moments, like tonight, where your neighbors are in bed, and a car never passes and the sounds are not too loud or too quiet, that you begin to realize how full of noise the world is. From breezes, rats scurrying, to the fridge. Sounds never fade, but sometimes, they’re just loud enough to be relieving.

It’s at these moments when the world is at this decibel that I feel most at ease. The world, in moments like this, feel balanced. I wish I could tell you what it is, how to reach that level of sound, but I literally don’t know how. All I can hope for you is that your neighbors one day go to be early, turn off their TV, and the traffic stays put on the highway.