A kind friend invited us to have dinner recently at an upscale restaurant. The food was good, the service acceptable, the ambience purgatorial. We were seated in a dining room under a Maginotesque concrete vault that echoed and augmented the ear-splitting roar of the semi-intoxicated guests at the nearby bar and surrounding tables. Alas, it has been my sad experience that there is more peace and quiet conducive to conversation in fast food restaurants than in most clip-joints. Why is this, I wonder? Haven’t the upper-crust restaurateurs the prudence to employ an acoustical engineer to optimize their premises for civilized dining? Or could it be that these venues are riotous by design?

I have observed that my fellow American cannot be sure they are having a good time unless surrounded by noise that numbs the mind and prevents truly social conversation. For instance: in the city park across the street, every fun event is heralded and accompanied by obstreperous music from loud speakers, gyrating, dissonant music that accompanies singing that is a series of wails and shrieks. Or, at the ball park, the silence and tension between plays that make baseball the queen of sports are a thing of the past, that contemplative space now being filled by thunderous music or vulgar announcements. I watch the people in attendance there and see that most of them cannot shut up and pay attention to the game, but are busy talking, no, shouting to one another over the din of the music and the shouted communications of people who surround them.

Contemporary society has, I think, a horror ritus, sc., a horror of formality, and must diffuse any hint of formality with a barrage of first names and banal folksy humor. Similarly, contemporary society has a horror silentii, a horror of silence, and must prevent or expel silence with anesthetic pop-culture music and bellowed pop-culture prattle.