Vol III: Space and Silence

It is 10:00pm, and I just walked home from my night job in a Boston-area suburban neighborhood. The streets tonight were dark and empty enough to invoke thoughts of The Stand, or that episode of The Twilight Zone where Burgess Meredith wakes up from a nap to find he’s the last man on Earth. The stores were closed, doors chained shut, front windows gated. The now-leafless trees reached their spidery, knotted arms into the still black night. My shadow elongated as I passed a flickering streetlight. I could actually hear it flicker, that static-laced buzz of a faltering bulb. It’s strange, this silence, so close to what is one of America’s notable cities. For the past three years, I’ve been wanting peace and quiet and a little bit of elbow room. Now that I have it, it sometimes seems creepy to me.

There are 50 million people in South Korea, one sixth of the U.S. population, all living in a country the size of Indiana. Of those 50 million people, 10 million live in Seoul, and another 15 million live in the areas surrounding Seoul—Gangnam, Bundang, Incheon, and the like—making Seoul the seventh most densely-populated city on Earth, ahead of Shanghai, Beijing, Mexico City and Tokyo. No U.S. city even comes close. If you were to divide the population evenly over the area of Seoul, you’d have over 17,000 people per square kilometer. New York, our largest city, would have 10,000 people per square kilometer. Los Angeles would have less than 3,000. Boston, well, at times it seems like an overgrown farm in comparison.

The density of Seoul’s population has many effects, both on the culture, and on those who live there. Fierce competition among businesses, for example, leading to one-upping each other with larger and larger, louder and more garish neon signs. Rows upon rows of identical, utilitarian apartment complexes. Massive amounts of traffic. Men, standing outside shoe stores, shouting into a megaphone. Light pollution (only two or three times, in three years, did I see stars, and those nights were spent on islands, away from the main peninsula). Noise pollution. Every kind of personal space violated. Loudspeakers, built into the wall of your apartment, blare building announcements in Korean (“the hot water will be shut off today between 3:00-4:00 during routine maintenance”) at 8:00am. An absence of “excuse me” as you are shoulder-checked in a crowded department store, and, before long, the absence of your own “excuse me.” The dull throb of an unyielding and untreatable and often unidentifiable stress. The view from your window of other people’s windows. Peering out, seeing others peering back. An endless hum. Homesickness, not necessarily for your actual home, but for the more general idea of personal space. The heart and its slow, steady ache for peace and quiet. Peace and quiet, that great unconsidered luxury. It’s like that old Cinderella power ballad said (or, well, shrieked), “don’t know what ya got ‘til it’s gone.”

I got my first real sense of it a month after leaving Korea, when I stood on the back deck of the honeymoon cabin my wife and I rented in northern Quebec, in the pitch-black darkness, listening to the buzz of insects and the gentle lapping of the lake in an area with less than 15 people per square kilometer. For the first time in years (three for me, six for her) we were actually alone. Not a headlight, a distant car horn, or the scent of someone else’s far-off chimney. Nothing. We were finally alone. I didn’t realize how badly I’d needed it, that nothingness, that quiet. Have you ever been in a room when a fan that has been blowing or an old dishwasher that has been running suddenly shuts off, and only then are you aware of how noisy it was? That’s what it felt like.

In many ways, Americans are spoiled brats. Not only do we rarely consider how lucky we are, but when we do, we hardly ever recognize some of the most important luxuries we have available to us. For me, personal space, silence, and the ability to get the fuck away from one another, at least for a little while, are really high up on that list.

And while I often complain about America–its endless wars and profiteering, its lies and smug spin-and-smear politicking, its waste, its decayed value system and horrific diet, its shrinking, borrowed and stolen securities, its terrible fashion and mind-bogglingly stupid television programs–I have to take a moment to say that there is something magical that still lingers here. I can almost smell it rising from the earth. Driving through the thick, blazing autumn leaves of New Hampshire, staring ahead into the rolling hills of Vermont, or even, as I did tonight, strolling down a vacant, eerily silent suburban street in the cold November air, I can feel it, this blessing of solitude granted by this, my land, my America, my home.