The Cacophony Of Modern Life

Yesterday I was sitting in South Station waiting for my train, and trying to read an interesting collection of essays by Mary Beard on a variety of subjects having to do with classical antiquity.  I say "trying," because even though I have a rather powerful capacity for concentration, the surround, as they say nowadays, was putting me to a severe test.  There was the endless loop of the Amtrak television screen advertising the virtues of dogs sniffing the luggage, of the necessity of "See Something, Say Something" and various other scenarios guaranteed to raise your paranoia to the max, there was a giant screen advertising a local performance of "Phantom of the Opera" with the endlessly repeated opening chords of music and the scene of the phantom pulling the heroine along a flight of stairs, but, new and even more revolting, there was a "live" broadcast from something called the Herald Radio set at a counter in mid station where three young men interviewed each other about the prospects of some sport or another, baseball most likely, which while it may have gone out to the masses, also came over a receiver set loud enough for those at the adjacent tables to get an involuntary hearing.  As I could plainly see everyone was bent over their tablets and phones busy with their various social media, or plugged in to a musical device; nobody cared about these silly fools and their broadcast.  Only the day before I had gone to a doctor's office in the wilds of Weymouth where the waiting room was adorned with a large tv screen broadcasting some day time tripe which I guarantee no one was noticing.  Ditto the last time I sat waiting to board a plane, ditto the doctor's office I visited last in Sarasota Florida. Listen up, Everybody, are we living in the Twilight Zone?  What is with all this background chatter, murmur, music every goddamn minute?  Today I was raking something in the back lawn and suddenly heard a daytime radio show, and where was this coming from?  My next door neighbors were having work done on the siding of their house, ladders had been set up, and workmen scaling them, and of course they had to have a radio going or they would not have been able to concentrate or whatever it was that their psyches needed.  When I last had my roof redone in Cambridge, I specifically insisted that there be no outside radio playing while the roofers worked and even though I was paying them top dollar, they almost balked.  I kept trying to impress upon them that the  houses were too close together to permit this promiscuous music broadcasting, they kept trying to insist that their mental health depended upon it.  And I thought of the average American home these days, the children shouting, one or two television programs playing, the dishwasher going, the washing machine going, the wife on the phone with a friend, the husband on another, and realized it's just poor old me, the neurasthenic who doesn't get it. I look forward to the silence of the tomb.