Silence impressed me most when I used to make trips down to Florida. Wandering around the subdivision where I grew up, in the middle of a weekday, was like walking among the dead. With most people at work or otherwise occupied the houses were mostly empty. The streets crackled only with the sounds of leaves and twigs crushed under my feet.
Silences like this exist in bustling cities, too. Some years ago I walked around midtown Manhattan with a field recorder. This type of device is typically used for nature recordings on account of its super-sensitivity. That gadget picked up every scintilla of sound. Conversations taking place half a block away and at perfectly normal volume sounded like they were inside my head. Unable to differentiate the importance of one sound over another the device pulled it all in in such a way that made a seemingly calm city street sound like chaos.
When I removed the headphones I was startled at how silent the city seemed. Granted this was not Times Square, which is exceptionally noisy. This was in front of the Time & Life Building on 6th Avenue on a weekday afternoon. Noise came and went, to be sure. Sirens and car horns bleated past like floats in a parade. But on balance it amazed me how quiet and even serene New York suddenly seemed to me after hearing its every aural nuance cacophonously mashed together.
Pictures from Tampa in 1996 (using a Canon ELPH APS film camera) remind me of the silence that surrounds us. I rediscovered these images today. They make me a little sad (as do a great many things), but they also make me certain that the past itself is forever silent. These pictures, properly considered boring by most standards, find me payphone hunting around Tampa and wandering the deserted campus of my high school alma mater.
