We Live in Noise

The imagination is how we find our way toward cultural transformation...we are threading our way toward stories that might change the world, but we need our cave time, our dream space.

The first time I went into a Saks, I thought, “This place is quiet.”

I was early for a meeting in Beverly Hills, and I thought I would look around. I had just come to LA, and I had never bought any new clothes, so I was ready to investigate fancy. Pretty soon, someone was following me around the quiet store.

“Are you following me?” I asked.

“I am,” she said. “You don’t belong here.”

It was the Eighties. People just said things like that.

“You are so right,” I said, looking at the price tag on a blouse. How people paid for these things, I had no idea.

I never went into a Saks again. I knew where I wasn’t wanted.  

I bought my clothes at Buffalo Exchange and cheap places in the mall. 

I shopped for my kids at Old Navy, Santee’s Alley, the roar and lights of Ross and Target. Years later, I stepped into Bergdorf Goodman and felt, again, that eerie, churchlike quiet. I crept around carefully, but I was older and had upgraded from leggings and rocker t-shirts. No one followed me.  

There was a blouse for two thousand, then I found one for three, later one for six; I hadn’t gotten to the dresses. My car might be worth one of these blouses.

On the noise of the street, I found myself thinking about New York and all the money rushing by. In the subway, the noise feels like being inside a machine. 

When my kids grew up, we gave them no television. I wanted them to experience life without noise, because the best part of my childhood was the quiet. Yes, there were beatings and adults with sticks, there were whistles, and we all rushed to prayers and classes and chores. But there were also hours when we disappeared into the woods, and the only sound was the ticking of the stars. When we listened to deer and porcupines. We slept in sleeping bags by streams under the Milky Way.  

When I took my kids out to the redwoods, it wasn’t only to learn how to make a fire and put up a tent, it was because the life of the imagination ignites in silence.  

All those years, I pitched a tent in my head toward a future of bookcases and love and joy. I lived in my head, which is why I still live too much of a life of the mind. 

The imagination is how we find our way toward cultural transformation. We who are writers, who work in publishing: we are threading our way toward stories that might change the world, but we need our cave time, our dream space. I plan to wander back to the place where the sky was built and find my pulse again. 

After Frankfurt. After this meeting and that meeting. 

At the end of this month, I go back to silence.