Notes on a Quiet City

I spent a weekend last month in a town with a population of nine hundred. I went there because I needed to be somewhere I had never been, and the train ticket was cheap. I did not expect anything in particular. What I found was quiet — a particular kind of quiet that I had not realized I was missing.

The sound of footsteps

On the second morning I went for a walk at six. The streets were empty. The shops were shuttered. A bakery three blocks from the hotel had its lights on, and I could hear, from across the street, the sound of someone rolling dough.

I realized, standing there, that I had not heard my own footsteps in months. Not the literal sound of them — I walk every day — but the experience of hearing them. In the city I live in, footsteps are a sound underneath other sounds: traffic, construction, the distant bass of someone else’s music. They are noise. They are not a thing you listen to.

In the small town, in the early morning, my footsteps were the loudest thing on the street. They were the soundtrack. And I noticed, after a few minutes of walking, that I was walking differently — slower, more deliberately, because the sound of my own steps had become something I wanted to make well.

What the noise was hiding

I do not think the city I live in is unusually loud. I think most cities are loud, and most people who live in them have stopped noticing. The noise becomes a kind of background radiation — present everywhere, accounted for by the body, invisible to the mind.

The thing I had stopped noticing was not the noise itself but what the noise was hiding. In the small town, in the quiet, I could hear myself think. Not in the metaphorical sense — I mean I could hear the actual sentences in my head, the way you hear a person talking in the next room. In the city, my thinking had become a kind of pressure: a felt sense of having a lot on my mind, without the words to articulate what any of it was.

In the quiet, the words came back. Not all at once. But over the course of the weekend, I noticed that I had been carrying around three or four half-formed thoughts that I had not been able to finish — sentences I had started in my head months ago and never completed, because there had never been enough silence around them for me to hear how they ended.

The cost of returning

I came back to the city on Monday morning. The first thing I noticed was the noise. The second thing I noticed was that, within an hour, I had stopped noticing it again.

This is the strange thing about ambient noise: you can hear it when it is new, and then your brain edits it out, and you forget there was ever a different way to hear. The small town becomes a memory. The quiet becomes a thing you remember having experienced, rather than a thing you continue to experience.

I have been back for three weeks. I have not figured out how to bring the quiet with me. But I have started taking walks without headphones. I have started leaving the radio off in the mornings. I have started noticing, at least sometimes, the sound of my own footsteps.

It is a small thing. But small things are sometimes the only things that stick.

A recommendation

If you live in a city, and you have a free weekend, and you can find a cheap train ticket to somewhere with fewer than a thousand people: go. Do not bring headphones. Do not bring a podcast. Bring a notebook and a pen, and walk in the early morning, and listen to the sound of your shoes on the pavement.

You may not learn anything. You may just be cold and bored. But you may also, for the first time in a while, hear yourself think. That is worth the price of the ticket.