THE HAPPY DEAF.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 205, 31 August 1933, Page 6

THE HAPPY DEAF.

It is well, perhaps, that an American visitor to England should have been the one to reply to i another American visitor's complaint about the chiming of clocks in the night, because most , English people would hardly know what to say (says "The Times"). So many have been brought , up near chiming clocks, so many have grown used to them, and, when away from them, to miss them, that the idea of objecting to them must seem very odd, and the suppression of a permanent feature of English life in response to the demands of passing strangers an act of almost obsequious courtesy. The discussion serves to reawaken wonder at the difference of taste in noises. The countryman cannot, sleep for the motor h*>rns, engines, milk carts, | all the nian-made din of the town; and the townsman will be kept angrily awake by the country silence or by the wind in the trees, and will start up in panic at the hoot of an owl or the barking of a fox. There is no accounting for tastes in this matter; and the mystery is only deepened when chimes are condemned and no word is said of ■other noises which murder sleep, make thought impossible, and drive even -well-balanced and music-loving minds to envy of those whose ears hear nothing. By day and by night, happy, we may cry, the deaf, whom kindly Nature has dulled to the suffering which hearing ears must endure. There are the pneumatic drills, the crash of gears, the rattling of- old and ill-loaded lorries, the scream of accelerated engines, and, worst of all, the endless, useless, abominable din of mechanical motor horns, the needless, heedless use of which the authorities make no feeblest attempt to stop. There has been outcry of late against street musicians. The worst sort of all, the man who is no musician but merely turns the handle of a noisy piano-organ, is indeed intolerable to all whose work demands thought. But he gives pleasure to the many; he is soon gone; and all the street music in London is but a very small part of the general din that is never gone. And charity bids us believe that it is the desire to be protected from that din which induces so many people to make their own noises by the mechanical means which science has reserved for this highly favoured age. It is not because they deliberately mean to annoy, to offend, to insult their neighbours that they turn on, at all hours of the day and niglit. the noise that is sold to them ready made. They do not listen to it; tliev are sometimes unaware whether it is being made or not; but they feel that they are protecting themselves against all the other noises in which they have no say. The trouble is that they cannot, or will not, protect themselves without imposing their noise upon their neighbours.; and the arrogance, the insolence, of such an imposition is obscured by the fear lest their neighbours should impose their own noises. So the evil spreads like the rings on a pond, save that, the wider it grows, the deeper the disturbance. And • when the chimes of our cathedrals and churches and colleges are to be swept into this rubbish pit of unwanted noise, it muH seem as if only the happy deaf had any chance of remaining sane. i