On starlight nights I used to pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little, sleeping houses on either side, w...ith their storm-windows and covered back porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe. Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not f...or the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In antiquity there was only silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise tr...iumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Speak, ye that ride on white asses, ye that sit in judgment, and walk by the way. They that are delivered from the noise of a...rchers in the places of drawing water, there shall they rehearse the righteous acts of the Lord,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Give ear to my prayer, O God; and hide not thyself from my supplication.... Attend unto me, and hear me: I mourn in my complaint, and make a noise;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sing unto the Lordwith the harp, with the harp, and the voice of a psalm.... With trumpets and sound of cornet make a joyful noise before the Lord,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »