Our dear metropolis, already blessed in so many obvious ways, has a secret superabundance of a precious resource. Fortunate Finland, too, is similarly blessed with this priceless commodity.
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You can't dig it up or chop it down and collect it and pile it up in heaps. You can't photograph it or point a finger at it, or, for once, blame Andrew Barr for how much it is going to cost taxpayers.
Can you guess what it is?
Give up?
The commodity we have (figurative) stacks of is (whisper it) silence.
We share this mixed blessing of superabundant silence with Finland and your columnist is banging on (but with muffled drum sticks) about the subject having just seen Daniel A. Gross's article This Is Your Brain on Silence in the online science magazine Nautilus. http://nautil.us/
The thought-stoking piece discusses Finland's embrace of silence as a national resource and then discusses what the latest science says about silence's impacts on us. The experiments discussed do seem to point to silence doing us, mostly, a power of good.
For example researcher Imke Kurtz was expecting that some sounds might prompt the development of new brain cells in laboratory mice. They didn't. But to her surprise she found that two hours of silence per day prompted cell development in the brain region related to the formation of memory. Now she is daring to dream that neurologists may find a therapeutic use for silence, in, say, the treatment of conditions like dementia and depression.
The Finnish connection is that Gross charts how marketers given the job of thinking how to market Finland's uniquenesses to the world, stumbled across a brand new theme: silence. They diagnosed that modern society often seems intolerably loud and busy, and so "Silence is a resource," and surely could be marketed just like clean water or wild mushrooms. "In the future, people will be prepared to pay for the experience of silence," the report fancied.
The idea grew, like wild mushrooms, and now there is much made of Finland's priceless silences with a Silence, Please page on the spiffing VisitFinland.com website. Much of Finland is lake and forest and in the stillness you can hear a Great Grey Owl (pictured) sigh, hear a reindeer mutter under its breath.
Gross reports that Noora Vikman, an ethnomusicologist, lives in a remote Finnish place. She is (how wonderful a job!) "a consultant on silence" for Finland's marketers.
Gross wonders if "Maybe silence sells because, so often, we treat it as a tangible thing - something easily broken, like porcelain or crystal, and something delicate and valuable."
Surely Finland's example in this should provoke some thoughts in the 'marketers' of our city and territory? Hitherto we have struggled to bring the tourists of the world to Canberra for anything especially Canberran. Then, next time we find ourselves defending our eccentric city from its big-city critics we might brag about our having degrees of neurologically nourishing sshhh that they, living in megacities of constant racket, can only dream of.
The ACT bristles, softly, with peace and quiet. But sometimes, for some of us who love some human clamour, the quiet of Canberra can be oppressive.
There are times (especially at night when is being a kind of Sleepless In Theodore, Wide-Awake In Wanniassa, lying awake and worrying about the meaning of life) when Canberra's utter quiet is alarming. One wonders if one might be dead, and seeks reassurance by asking "Am I dead?" of the person one is in bed with. In my experience she drawls (for she is from America) angrily "If only. Let me sleep, you jerk."
Canberra-like quiet may threaten to drive some of us bonkers. One olden days repairer of the Nullarbor Plain's rabbit-proof fences (alone save for his camels, poor conversationalists) reported in his memoirs how he would kick awake his camels just to make them move and make some jingle-jangle noises with their harnesses.
Canberra's quiet can unnerve and yet at its pure, clear best it enables some quality sounds that otherwise, mixed up with metropolitan hubbub, go unheard or be noticed, come across as clearly as a bugle call in a pause in an Anzac Day service. In Canberra you may hear the stifled sneeze of a lake's platypus and pick up the sweet summer "Howzat!" from a sports field two kilometres away as clearly as ringings of bells.
Some of Canberra's extreme NIMBYism may be due to the way in which our NIMBYs, pampered by the most pure suburban shhhh in the world, fight to resist any satanic "infill". Their quiet is part of the amenity they cherish, that "something easily broken ..." that Gross diagnoses. Infill threatens to bring in new people with their silence-sullying noises.
Sleepless in tomb-quiet Garran and wondering if I am dead, I have known a Boobook owl's hoot, framed by the general silence, come across with beautiful, husky clarity. It is as if the dear fowl is there in the room sitting on the wardrobe when really it 300 metres away across the road among those lonely mansions (with a tear in every room) of moonlit O'Malley.
