The Quiet Ones

I suspect the author will be unhappy to hear that the key message I took away from his nice little story (with David Foster Wallace quotes, no less) - was that he was identifying himself as the jerk who loudly whacks away at his keyboard, annoying the crap out of people around him. When I'm near those people in a public space, I always wonder if they are having some kind of mental-breakdown, or whether they are passive-aggressively trying to get people to move away from them. Or perhaps some combination of both.

Ironic, in that what he was trying to communicate was some concepts regarding recognizing the moral reality of those around him, when, in fact, he was one of those clueless types who likely hadn't considered the possibility that his whacking-away at his keyboard was really annoying others.

As to why the "riff-raff" tend to be a little more considerate on public transport - One reason is usually because you don't want to piss somebody off and get a punch to the head. They tend to play things a little more roughly on Oakland public transport than they do on Amtrak.

The funny thing is that two months ago when I was taking a train in France with some friends, instead of having a quiet car, they had a noisy car. And it was really quiet in there, by our American standards. There were quite a few elderly couples in the car, it seemed. We were talking and laughing and were probably the loudest on the car. At the end, the person I was traveling with who knew French remarked that the family next to us was talking about how loud and annoying we were. No one told us to be quiet, of course, since this was the loud car.

It would be even more ironic if he was working on this article.

On a positive note, it does a good job of showing how our perception of quiet can be different. I love going out into the nearby woods where you can't hear noise from the cars and trucks that make up so much of our town's noise. It's amazing how a plane going overhead seems so loud after being in the quiet for a few hours.

It's also pretty amazing how your ears adapt and if you choose to spend the night in the forest, you hear every small animal that scurries about.

I guess I'm one of the people who ruin it for everyone else. I'm ADD as all get out when it comes to something I'm not really into, but when I'm lasered in on something interesting, it would pretty much take a fire drill to break me out of that. I even prefer a background din in that situation over dead silence—so I've never been bothered by, or spoken out against, any of the trends away from silence. I love open-plan workspaces since I can have an ear open for anything particularly important or interesting (especially if it's relevant to what I'm working on).

The quiet car is great for returning home in the morning with a hangover...