When you walk into most public spaces in America it isn't quiet anymore. They pipe music through, and
the music's easy to make fun of because it's usually really horrible music, but it seems significant that we
don't want things to be quiet anymore. I don't know that I could defend it, but that seems to me to have
something to do with when you feel like the purpose of your life is to gratify yourself and get things for
yourself and go all the time, there's this other part of you that is almost hungry for silence and quiet and
thinking hard about the same thing for maybe half an hour instead of 30 seconds that doesn't get fed at
all, and it makes itself felt in the body in a kind of dread. I don't know whether that makes a whole lot of
sense, but I think it's true that here in the U.S every year the culture gets more and more hostile; I don't
mean hostile like angry, just indeed it becomes more and more difficult to ask people to read or to look at a
piece of art for an hour, or to listen to a piece of music that's complicated and that takes work to
understand. There are a lot of reasons, but particularly now in computer and internet culture, everything is
so fast, and the faster things go the more we feed that part of ourselves, but don't feed the part of our
selves that likes quiet; that can live in quiet, that can live without any kind of stimulation.