NOISE INTERMINABLE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23707, 14 January 1939, Page 20

NOISE INTERMINABLE

In this matter of noise the quietists may as well accept defeat and have done with it, writes Mr Ivor Brown in the Manchester Guardian. The young are rapidly losing all taste for silence. Do you, afflicted reader, have a neighbour who without pause proceeds to ride a rackety, explosive motor bicycle round and round your square, terrace or village green? If you have, you will soon notice that very few of your neighbours who are under 30 have the slightest objection to this proceeding, which is probably galling you to frenzy. They have the wireless running all day, and scarcely notice that. To them the street, like the sky, is a naturally noisy place, in which explosive or furiously accelerated engines, screaming gears and ear-splitting blasts on horns are no more offensive than sheep bells.on a mountainside. There is nothing strange in their hardihood. Evolution is usefully at word, hardening the eardrums 'and toughening the nervous systems to meet new conditions of life. I myself have a certain taste for silences, and resent, in my fogeyish way, the stabbing of the night by a raucous gear change or the clatter of motor bicycles. But at least I do know that I am a- loser, that the struggle naught availeth and that we are living in a world which has come to accept noise. So let us live up to our century, and find true happiness in a room (or even a beauty spot) where aeroplanes are roaring overhead, wireless runs on, a tape machine clicks, a typewriter chatters, a gramophone intervenes and a dozen drivers are changing gears outside in the street. If you cannot relish that, you will not greatly enjoy the English scene of 1950. It were well to make an effort, for tumult is most certainly another of our conquerors.