A Little Peace and Quiet

One time when my husband and I were out to dinner, before we had our son, we ran into a couple we knew who told us that they’d be renting a vacation house with eleven of their good friends. They punctuated that news, and the conversation, by saying, “How could we not have a good time?” As soon as they’d walked away, I turned to my husband and said, “That sounds like my idea of hell.” He seconded the notion.

To be clear, I’m a social person, I do actually have friends, and I truly enjoy talking to people, whether I know them or not. But I’m also cognizant that I don’t need—or want—people around me all the time. My husband and son are the same way. If I were having the introvert versus extrovert conversation, which my son and I did recently, I’d describe us as a household of friendly introverts. Or extroverted introverts. Or on the introverted side of extroversion. However it’s expressed, essentially, we like parties but might just hang out on the periphery and chat with the one or two other people hovering around the food table.

Even our dog fits in with our family vibe: sometimes when we’re petting her, she must decide she’s had enough, because she’ll abruptly get up and move to the other room. Clearly, our dog likes her alone time. Well so do I.

When my son was a toddler, and a very cute one at that, I remember thinking, in true Mother of the Year fashion, “Why does this kid keep following me around the house?” I told him that recently, and I don’t remember his exact reaction, but it was something along the lines of rolling his eyes, saying “Real nice, Mom. Real nice,” or silently wondering how he got stuck with someone like me. All perfectly valid responses.

My husband, who is a morning person through and through, likes having the house pretty much to himself in the early hours, which is when he habitually gets up. On the days when I wake up really early too, which isn’t a frequent occurrence, I upset his daily routine and get in his way. His general attitude is less along the lines of, “Oh, it’s great that we have this time together” and more like “Why are you here?” or “Shouldn’t you go back to bed?”

As a one-and-a-half-year-old, our son would put up his hand like he was directing traffic and tell us, “Way,” which meant “Go away” or “Stay away.” As a three- or four-year-old, he went through a phase where he’d gather up some of his favorite belongings, including a blanket or two, and go hide out by creating nests for himself behind the large club chairs in our living room.

Apparently, all three of us—or four, if we include our dog in the count, and hey, why not?—have this need for a place apart, a nook, a quiet space and time, and so I can only conclude that the urge is either universal, passed down in families, or contagious.

Given my general contentment with solitude, it’s no coincidence that I also found fulfillment working freelance, from home. In practical terms, that means I spent eight-plus hours a day alone for about fifteen years. The copyediting and proofreading I did, and still sometimes do, are skilled tinkers’ trades, and the work is, by its nature, behind the scenes, which is mostly where I prefer to be.

That freelance work, as well as the writing I do, are a kind of manual labor that doesn’t require physical strength but does require quiet. I find it impossible to comprehend the sentences in front of me when people are having conversations around me. It was fortunate, then, that I was able to set up a home office with a door, down in the garden-level basement of our little rowhouse. In my current residence, I’ve scaled the heights to the second floor, though the room I’ve claimed is smaller than my last office, only about the size of a walk-in closet. But it’s a sweet spot warmed by a cast-iron radiator that pumps out heat, and a large window that floods the room with the warmth of natural light. Still, noise passes pretty easily even through a heavy wooden door that closes firmly. And interruptions, including welcome ones like a knock at that door, can interrupt a person’s concentration and workflow.

Of course, I find, as I’m sure people do who don’t have the luxury of an entire room of their own, that the dining room or kitchen table can function just fine as a workspace. For me, that’s a viable option either super early or really late, when no else in the household is awake, or after they’ve left for school or work. Some people thrive on or at least are not bothered by the noises of the day or by swirls of activity and chaos. They’re fine with overstimulation. The reason they get up at 4:30 a.m. or burn the midnight oil isn’t that they need reduced noise levels or fewer distractions, it’s that they want to squeeze a lot in. If by chance they find themselves chasing a clear, calm mental state, maybe they meditate, sign up for a hot yoga class, go for a run, read a book, zone out, or pour themselves a stiff glass of bourbon.

All that sounds super helpful—okay, well, except for the meditation and yoga, which aren’t my thing—but for me quietude needs a boost from the quiet around me, and I’ve always found it by, for instance, sitting down at my desk for a work session after ten o’clock at night. I find it easier to hear my own thoughts during the time when other people’s voices or somebody’s blaring music aren’t competing for space. I just need that mental airbag.

Maybe I’m just looking to bolster my position that being a night owl is a benefit, not a detriment, but I do particularly relish the silence at night, which can be a very quiet span of time in a household. Nighttime’s quiet is as muffled as the sound under a warm, thick blanket. I stay up to savor it regardless of whether I have a work deadline to meet.

When I first shifted into the freelancer’s life, I found that one of its great pleasures was knocking off work late in the evening and migrating into the small room next to my home office. The many consecutive hours of reading I did while copyediting and proofreading could be hard on the eyes, and my brain would still be worked up, so although I might have been tired, I’d need to wind down before being able to sleep. I’m a movie lover, as well as someone susceptible to getting hooked on the occasional TV series, so it became not out of the ordinary for me to pop a disc in the DVD player, cozy up on the couch, and settle in to watch whatever I’d chosen. At, say, eleven p.m.

It wasn’t as if anyone was available at that time to hang out. My husband would always already have gone to bed, and anyway, he loathes romantic comedies, which admittedly I’d take advantage of his absence to watch. Sometimes, instead of watching a guilty-pleasure movie, I would choose to sink into a novel to relax, but if I’d already done eight to ten hours of close reading, I usually needed something other than text to look at. And movies, or the familiar characters and stories from a favorite TV show, can be really comforting company to have. Like having friends without any of the effort.

Maybe I just spend too much time by myself.

The reduced noise level I seek at night can be found in mornings as well, but my need for sleep is nonnegotiable, and before seven a.m. isn’t my best time. Also, the quality of the quiet to be had in the morning is different from what I find at night. Morning quiet is full of anticipation, like a steaming cup of coffee that hasn’t been sipped from yet, and sometimes I take advantage of that delicious time to finish a work project or read a book, or to garden. Morning quiet is bright, and on this still-cold early-spring day I’m happily conjuring up memories from last summer of being outside weeding early enough to see and feel the sun rising over the trees.

Whether in the form of an especially productive time of day or an office with a door, the right surroundings provide a buffer. They’re kind of our personal packing material. Or to be a little retro, I’d say the right surroundings are the tuners on our radios or the antennae to our analog TVs: it’s impossible to get a clear signal without them.

Maybe some people feel soothed, or their thoughts are freed up, in bright and wide-open rooms, but I’m not one of those people. Copyediting, proofreading, or writing are, for me, best done in low light at a desk in a corner, or in a confined space. When I’m reading for fun, my focus is sharpest if I’m ensconced in the soft cushions of one of our big club chairs, with a homemade quilt tucked around me. Even my back garden is hemmed in by a low stone border. The locked door and high brick wall in The Secret Garden hold a lot of appeal for me.

Quiet and dark and closed-off and cave-like aren’t always enough, though. Sometimes, heft is what’s required.

The large oak desk I used to work at was weighty. Not only big and heavy, but a desk of consequence. In its spot against a wall on the lowest level in our tall, skinny rowhouse, the desk pinned me down with both gravity and gravitas. I needed its solidity to anchor me in place. My thoughts needed it too, so they wouldn’t drift.

It sounds to my ears like I have excessive requirements for constraining the thoughts bouncing around in my head and getting them to line up in a useful formation. Perhaps these requirements make me sound high maintenance, but I think what they actually make me is a normal human. Author Stephen King, in his memoir-manifesto On Writing, described the various places he has written: as a teenager and young man, under the eaves in his upstairs room; at the beginning of his career and his married life, in a small laundry area where he used a makeshift lap desk; for a while, later in his career, along a back hallway off a kitchen pantry. Practical considerations were often the driving factors: in the first case he probably got stuck with the room no one else in his family wanted; in the second, poverty had him living in tight quarters with his wife and growing family; and in the third, a terrible accident that limited his mobility for a time put him in the position of needing temporary office space on the first floor of his home.

But ultimately, by choice, he returned to a spot under the eaves, moving his desk from the middle of a large room in the home he made with his family to a spot in a corner. He explained it in symbolic terms—that life is at the center, and writing supports and is subordinate to life—but my take on it is that he, too, needed a little place to himself, away and apart from the energy flying around the open room. And, of course, he recommended closing the door if you have one. Because it’s helpful to have the energy or your thoughts or whatever linger in the corner or in the basement office or under the eaves or in a room below the stairs, as long as no one has locked you in there.

I live in a freestanding house on an amply sized lot, and I consider one of the great benefits and privileges of owning it to be that we can go home, shut the door, and instantly have a nice little barricade against the noise of the outside world. Granted, we live in a small town in a not especially populated area, so it isn’t all that noisy to begin with. But it’s the principle of the matter. There’s a kind of magic to having your own place, even if it’s only for a couple of hours at the end of the day. I like to imagine that’s why the house finches and robins return to their same nests under the various rooflines of our house every year. And I’m sure that’s why kids have treehouses, and why they make forts out of pillows and bedsheets. It’s why men have man caves, or a workbench in the garage. And why teenagers ask if they can eat meals in their bedrooms, or read at the dinner table instead of holding a conversation. Yeah, maybe that last example is rudeness or temporary grumpiness. But some of us need to keep at least a small part of ourselves in reserve, and we’d appreciate a little peace and quiet, if you don’t mind, so we can get our thoughts on straight. When they are, we emerge from our hideout and from behind the closed door, into the full light of day. And then, how could we not have a good time?