Invisible: the Essential Guide for Aliens Stranded on Earth by Tony Matthews

Author:Tony Matthews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Big Sky Publishing
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

The Deep Thought Centre & Other Uncanny Concepts

Noise is stress and noise is everywhere. For the recluse who is seeking quietude in order to be creative, noise is a barrier that has to be fought on almost a daily basis, depending upon the place where the creative thought processes are to be carried out, of course. Yet people hear noises differently. Ask anyone who wears a hearing aid. With modern hearing aids most extraneous noises can be squelched out, leaving only the sounds that are needed, like the voice of the person who is talking to you. Yet with older hearing aids, especially the horrible things that went by wires from the ears down to a box in the top pocket, noise-cancelling was not an option and all kinds of sounds just belted into the eardrums making almost deaf people totally deaf within a few short and horribly clangorous days.

I had a headmaster like that. He was so deaf he’d take the amplifier box out of his pocket and hold it up to my face like a 1950s microphone. Admittedly, it was the 1950s. It was really embarrassing. I always felt as if I were giving evidence at a Court of Petty Sessions or something. When I was talking to him I had an almost irresistible urge to stop actually voicing the words at all and just keep mouthing them so that he’d think there was something terribly wrong with his hearing aid and begin shaking it and thumping it with his fists so that he could hear me again. I never quite plucked up the courage to do that because had I done so I would have peed myself laughing and the game would have been up immediately. It wasn’t just the prospective flood of hilarious leakage, of course. The headmaster was about ninety feet tall with really long arms so the swing and trajectory of his caning arm would have been devastatingly effective. I’d carefully calculated all that beforehand, naturally, which is something that reclusive little introverted twerps do because they tend to think rather a lot.

For recluses, noise comes as a huge wave. When I walk into a shopping-centre, for example, which is about once every ten years, the noise can sometimes smother me like a prickly blanket of discordant sound — in short, it’s a really ugly and annoying cacophony. Yet to most people it’s just the chatter of people, the rolling of shopping trolleys, the clink of glasses and cups in the coffee shops and the various tones and beats of music coming simultaneously from half a dozen shops. It’s just shopping-centre background-buzz. Most people actually like it. Shopping makes them happy so these sounds are synonymous of that happiness.

Therefore, if noise is stress to introverts and recluses, then quietude is not just silence, it is a place, almost a physical place, where we need to be as often as possible. It’s where we live. People often think, and comment aloud, that reclusive little

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