On Nerves and Noises.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVLI, Issue 10, 6 September 1911, Page 16

On Nerves and Noises.

TRIALS OF A LONDONER.

By

D. Donaldson

©URS is the day of fervid activities and frenzied motion. All our machinery is driven at top speed md our nerves are always in dangerous tension. We have wondrously sharpened our senses and quickened bur sympathies. We are so delicately strung, and so nicely poised, that every breath from without can sway us. We are supremely sensitive recording instruments and our stability is as easily disturbed as that of the magnetic needle. We have developed our capacities both for pleasure and for pain; we can enjoy more than our ancestors, but we can suffer more also. Among the means of agony made accessible to us by the over-development of nervous sensibility, not the least distressing is our increased susceptibility to noise. Schopenhauer eloquently expressed the anguish-of the super-impression-able brain -of his day; but, compared with the sufferings of the “second-rate sensitive minds” of our time, his troubles are negligible. We have become accustomed, it is true, to much that would indubitably have alarmed our grandfathers; the hiss of turbines, 'the drone of dynamos, the roar of railways and the tangle of tongues. We live with these, and we have ceased to notice them; they have, moreover, a rhythm that is not unrestful in its constancy. The rough average produces a feeling of balance and rest. Continuous noises, no matter how hideous in themselves, are sporific so long as they are uninterrupted. It is to the spasmodic and unrhythmical caesura that we owe most of our pain. The fitful silences hurt us more than the continued din. There is something infinitely restful in the regular pulse of the wheels of a railway carriage; but the jaggerT chirping of a sparrow, though perhaps essentially more beautiful, is as salt in our wounds. So, also, the jangling “treble bob” is less exasperating than the irregular vocalism of the domestic cat. The little, smarting tents of quiet try us more than the thundrous cannonade.

Noises in the open air, and when we are moving, have a vagueness that exalts them almost to the dignity of sounds; a kind of barbarian music which would crumble before analysis, but has in its very evanescence a charm. The rustling of trees and the splashing of pebbly streamlets, although we find in them neither books nor sermons, cause us no pain; but the least sensitive must know the cruel potentialities of a creaking door. A kindly wind will often screen us from the more fearsome irritations of a shunting-yard, and distance dilute the acid of a fife band until it becomes almost soothing. Few things can so increase 'the annoyance of a sleepless bed as the cooing of doves; yet, in a country ramble, we welcome whole choirs of shrill voices. The petty affects us more than the noble; our senses are all for detail. We have complicated the mechanism of our minds; and for this, as for all elaboration. we must pay; we are more sensitive than our ancestors, but we are also more frail. The daily increasing ugliness of human expression, including that attained in the fine arts, is shown most startlingly in our new noises. At home we have substituted for the kind crackle of coal fires the sickly oozing of hot water pipes; for the happy swishings of the carpet beater, the hungry suckings of vacuum cleaners. Domestic euphony is further endangered by the changes due to electricity; instead of the crisp sound of match-strik-ing we hear the snick of little buttons on the wall, and our meals are announced by shrill electric noises in place of the pleasant human summons. The soothing speech between man and beast, until lately to be heard In any livery stable, yields to the horrid grating of steel rods; the coailiman's cheery “cluck” is supplanted by the hootings of infamous chauffeurs. The bracing tones of the post-horn have died, to reappear ns something new nnd strange; and the pleasant patter of hoofs has ceased with the coming of the petrol engine. The

•countryside that echoed, but a few years ago, all tire beloved noises of farm ami meadow, is now but a sounding-board or the already hideous belchings and ba;k--ings of motor drivers. The lurid caeo■phones in use on all our high roads if they are to be read as indices'to the souls of their owners, make one Idol: to Hell for relief. It may be that we of to-day arc too puny for our environment; our conditions of life, perhaps, have outrun our powers of accommodation. We may be exotics in this age of steel, and the 'ugliness and noise we so fretfully laim-nt may be but the idiom of to-morrow. \\’a may lack insight, and our feeble complaint may serve only to amuse our il.ildren. We may be degenerate, but our pain is real. We may me a dying but we will have our swan-song.