Sound of silence

It’s early morn­ing as I sit to write this and out­side my win­dow a trac­tor en­gine has been chug­ging away for about 15 min­utes. The grape har­vest is in full swing and so there’s plenty of ac­tiv­ity where I live in Alt Penedès. The trac­tor even­tu­ally moves away with a roar that grad­u­ally ta­pers off as it lum­bers to­wards the vine­yards. Si­lence de­scends over the vil­lage once more. But not for long, as al­most im­me­di­ately the rip­ping sound of a metal shut­ter can be heard nearby, fol­lowed by an­other trac­tor en­gine sput­ter­ing into life. While the farmer pre­pares for the work­ing day, he leaves his trac­tor rum­bling, pre­sum­ably to warm the en­gine up. After 10 min­utes that trac­tor too goes roar­ing off in search of grapes. For a few mo­ments all is quiet again in the vil­lage. But then, a chain­saw be­gins whirring, its noise ris­ing to a high-pitched screech each time it bites into a log. Mean­while, my neigh­bour, who re­pairs cars for extra cash, gets going with a se­ries of metal­lic thuds punc­tu­ated by the clat­ter of a loose ex­haust as he at­tempts to bring the ve­hi­cle he is work­ing on back to life.

When I tell peo­ple that most of the time I work from home in a small vil­lage of a dozen or so houses sur­rounded by vine­yards and woods, they often react by telling me how lucky I am, imag­in­ing what a de­light it must be to work amid such peace and quiet. Well, we all know that the grass is al­ways greener, and I envy them their shops and ser­vices within easy walk­ing dis­tance. Not that I’m com­plain­ing; I like my work­ing con­di­tions well enough, and trac­tors and chain­saws aside, it’s true that I prob­a­bly get the ben­e­fit of ’peace and quiet’ more than most.

In fact, I got to think­ing about this while read­ing the in­ter­view with a ma­rine bi­ol­o­gist we have in this issue on pages 18 and 19. Miquel Ven­tura ex­plains how sea crea­tures have ben­e­fit­ted from the drop in human ac­tiv­ity dur­ing the lock­down. The im­prove­ment in the lives of these crea­tures has not just been due to fewer peo­ple, and the waste and pol­lu­tion they in­evitably bring with them, in­vad­ing their en­vi­ron­ment, which is some­thing I would have ex­pected, but be­cause of the lack of noise nor­mally pro­duced by human ac­tiv­ity. He paints a pic­ture in which under nor­mal cir­cum­stances, ma­rine life is bom­barded by noise all the time, which is par­tic­u­larly per­ni­cious as many of these crea­tures are very sen­si­tive to it.

Through­out this cri­sis, an on­go­ing theme has been what ef­fect the change in pace in our work­ing and per­sonal lives might have on us as in­di­vid­u­als and as a so­ci­ety. We saw how dur­ing the lock­down the mas­sive re­duc­tion in com­mut­ing im­proved air qual­ity, for ex­am­ple. But what about noise?

I re­mem­ber the first times I ven­tured into town when the lock­down got un­der­way. There was a strange ten­sion in the air, which is to be ex­pected at such a time of un­cer­tainty, but I was also struck by how quiet and peace­ful the streets were. Low­er­ing the pace of life a few notches also has its good side. I’m prob­a­bly not the only one who has en­joyed far more ’quiet mo­ments’ in re­cent months than could have been imag­ined be­fore the virus struck. Hope­fully we can begin mov­ing be­yond coro­n­avirus soon and re­store some nor­mal­ity to our lives, but hope­fully we can also come out the other side with a greater ap­pre­ci­a­tion for those good things in life, such as peace and quiet, that we often de­nied our­selves in the pre-Covid era.