Sub-sonic
Dec.29, 2006, filed under Miscellany
On Christmas Day we all went for a walk down to the beach — me, Frood, Mum and Dad. As we wandered down the farmtrack, away in the distance I could hear engine noise.
Now, it might be the rose-tinted binoculars of nostalgia, which make everything from one’s childhood seem larger, sunnier and somehow happier than it probably was, but I’m sure that there were times of the year when I was a child when that engine noise wasn’t there. There were days, particularly Christmas, when people had better things to be doing than driving. Christmas, especially, I’m sure I remember the roads being utterly deserted, to the point where we used to ride our sleds down the hill past the school.
What has happened? What has happened to us that we have to be driving somewhere or the other every day of the year? What happened to us that we couldn’t just stay home for a couple of days and enjoy the peace and quiet?
Do we even know what silence is any more? Can anyone sit and imagine what the world would be like without that steady infra-sound grumble of discontented traffic, clogging up the roads of the country like arterial plaques, their behaviour much like the cholesterol settling in the arteries of the growingly obese people sat behind their wheels?
As above so below. The old magical principle. Chicken and egg. If the king is the land and the land is the king, and we are each king in our own territories, then we’re all responsible for the choking congestion. We know about the detrimental effects on air quality before we start even to consider and contemplate the more esoteric potential effects of all-pervasive infra-sound.
I long for one day a year when there is blessed, blissful silence. There has to be one day a year when everyone can stay where they are, surely. And why not Christmas Day? Everything is closed, there are families to enjoy and the weather is rotten for driving anyway.
Leave a Reply
-
Singularity
~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
