Waking up in Venice is unlike waking up in any other place. The day begins quietly. Only a stray shout here and there may break the calm, or the sound of a shutter being raised, or the wing-beat of the pigeons. How often, I thought to myself, had I lain thus in a hotel room, in Vienna or Frankfurt or Brussels, with my hands clasped under my head, listening not to the stillness, as in Venice, but to the roar of the traffic, with a mounting sense of panic. That, then, I thought on such occasions, is the new ocean. Ceaselessly, in great surges, the waves roll in over the length and breadth of our cities, rising higher and higher, breaking in a kind of frenzy when the roar reaches its peak and then discharging across the stones and the asphalt even as the next onrush is being release from where it was held by traffic lights. For some time now I have been convinced that it is out of this dine that the life is being born which will come after us and will spell our gradual destruction, just as we have been gradually destroying what was there long before us.
–W.S. Sebald, Vertigo
The Din is an apt word for the onslaught of sound assaulting us daily in urban life, and increasingly in rural life as well, and The Din one of the topics we mentioned, but didn’t get deep enough into in my last episode on Should This Exist? on Boom Supersonic. The sound of the supersonic plane is in the name itself: the sonic boom the plane makes as it crosses the sound barrier, which I’ve never heard myself, but is a tremendous, earth-shuddering sound, and one of the many reasons supersonic flight did not thrive in its last incarnation. I once walked in late to a lecture that was in progress, and didn’t know the name of the lecturer, I believe it was Peter Warshall. about how the sounds of our world–industrial sounds, airport noise, cars, traffic–were killing the animal life around us by making it impossible for animals to communicate with one another. Birds couldn’t find each other using birdcalls, bullfrogs living in a swamp near a highway were unable to hear each other’s mating calls. We ourselves feel the rising stress Sebald describes here, but The Din affects not only people, I was surprised to learn, though it should have been obvious. How well we sleep in the country, far from the noise and stress of urban life. I was just in Japan, where we noticed how harmonious and gentle the street sounds were–the sounds guiding blind people through crosswalks, or the bell announcing an arriving train–compared to the alarming, jarring noises of the alarms in the United States and Europe. We’re not paying enough attention to sound.
Another interesting conversation that didn’t make it to the podcast–each episode would be an hours-long if we kept everything in!–was the idea that I got from somewhere that the soul moves at the speed of a camel. I intuitively feel this to be true. The reason we have jetlag as we’re flying from, say, San Francisco to New York is that when we arrive we’re only there in body–our soul is moving its way across Utah, and really doesn’t arrive until more than a week later, the time it would take to fully recover from jet lag.
We talked about flight, and dreams of flying, and how is the symbology of dreams flying is a metaphor for release, for freedom, for shrugging of whatever binds you and transcending it. We talked of Daedalus, the original inventor and entrepreneur of ancient mythology, who of course fashioned the wings for Icarus, his son, who flew too close to the sun and came crashing downwards, to Daedalus’s great sorrow. This can be a metaphor for what happens to many entrepreneurs, who see what they created lead to things they never intended.
And yet another interesting conversation we had was about being greeted at airports. When our planes landed, back when I was a kid, my entire Filipino family–and Filipino families are big!–were waiting for us at our gate when we arrived. Every grandma, cousin, baby, uncle. When someone came, especially from far away, it was a major event. There was exclaiming and hugging. We hauled out our balikbayan boxes. Even now, I see large Indian families, or Mexican families, or sometime even Filipino families standing at gates in a flurry of greeting, but I see them less and less in large American cities where there are more business travelers, where travel is more frequent, and where Uber and Lyft have replaced the former tradition of being picked up and driven home from the airport. Being greeted at the airport is a terrible loss, my friend Anarghya and I agreed. You arrive and your soul may still be laboring across the Pacific. A circle of souls could find and embrace you at the end of your journey. There is no longer a tradition of welcoming, besides the now-common posters of beaming mayors welcoming you to their city, or a friendly Uber driving asking how your trip went. There is no longer a tradition of arrival.
