but his teacher doesn’t notice. The man busies himself with pushing back the frenzied referendum of his white hair. He slumps in his broken Bauhaus chair and commands, Now: C-sharp.
When the bell rings, ending the lesson, it sounds to Peter Els like the Tristan chord. He drops the score of his frenetic piano prelude in the green dumpster behind the Music Building, on top of scraps of drywall, a broken desk, and bales of waste office paper. He retreats to his dorm cell and digs in. From behind the union, the bullhorn-led call-and-response of a demonstration floats across Dunn Meadow. The chants for justice sound, in his ear, like ardent folk choruses begging to be orchestrated.
He works late, purging his style of all its superfluous flash and dazzle. He lets the phone nag on, a burr that becomes a whole parfait of pitches. Unanswered knocks on the door ring like tympani. The muffled joy of two new LPs released that very week seep through his cinder-block walls, two wildly different records that will go on to remake the world and leave a wake of nostalgia for decades to come . He hears these sounds the way Debussy heard his first gamelan band.
His desk drawer squeak turns into a tone poem and the hinge of his dorm room door soars like a Heldentenor. Briefly, Els’s music retreats into a staggering simplicity. But two months later, he’s back to his arcane self, the lesson lost, or not so much lost as tucked away, in a whole spectrum of overtones beyond his ear’s ability to hear.
M. H. Gordon gargled Serratia and recited Shakespeare in the House of Commons, 1906, to see if speech spread germs through the air.
In the Fiat on the way back, Els resisted the urge to turn on the radio. Not that the news frightened him anymore: by the time the Apocalypse came, we’d all long since have habituated. But the ride home took only five minutes, and anything he might learn about the Libyan no-fly zone or the Fukushima radiation cloud was not worth the further atomization of his brain. Two years earlier, he’d come across the first reports about chronic focal difficulty, from a source he could no longer remember. Since then, he’d tried to take his media in nothing smaller than fifteen-minute doses.
The account of the thirty-eight-year longitudinal study had shaken him: Two researchers, one now dead, had spent thirteen thousand days in blinding tedium, testing people. The study was more rigorous than elegant. But the brute data were undeniable. Over almost four decades, people in every North American demographic had lost, on average, somewhere around one-third of their “sustained focusing interval.” The two researchers—whose names Els failed to retain—documented significant declines in how well people could filter out distractions and attend to simple tasks. The country’s collective concentration was simply shot. People couldn’t hold a thought or pursue a short-term goal for anywhere near as long as they could a few years before, back in the waning days of analog existence.
The blogs bounced the story around for half a dozen days. Then chronic focal difficulty disappeared into its own symptoms. Collapses in phytoplankton and fish populations and honeybee hives, bedbugs and cyberworms, obesity and killer flu: life was awash in too many disorders to pay any one of them more than a few minutes’ mind. But the study gave Els the same shudder he’d felt the day he first saw a list of the top one hundred terms that passed through the world’s largest search engine. Soon afterward, he began choosing silence over any kind of background listening.
In silence, he drove back home. He saw the commotion just before turning onto Linden. His first thought was that his next door neighbor had had another heart attack. Two cream-colored, windowless vans sat in Els’s drive. A sedan stretched alongside them, in the parkway. Streamers of yellow tape cordoned off his house in a geometric proof gone wrong. The repeating,
When the bell rings, ending the lesson, it sounds to Peter Els like the Tristan chord. He drops the score of his frenetic piano prelude in the green dumpster behind the Music Building, on top of scraps of drywall, a broken desk, and bales of waste office paper. He retreats to his dorm cell and digs in. From behind the union, the bullhorn-led call-and-response of a demonstration floats across Dunn Meadow. The chants for justice sound, in his ear, like ardent folk choruses begging to be orchestrated.
He works late, purging his style of all its superfluous flash and dazzle. He lets the phone nag on, a burr that becomes a whole parfait of pitches. Unanswered knocks on the door ring like tympani. The muffled joy of two new LPs released that very week seep through his cinder-block walls, two wildly different records that will go on to remake the world and leave a wake of nostalgia for decades to come . He hears these sounds the way Debussy heard his first gamelan band.
His desk drawer squeak turns into a tone poem and the hinge of his dorm room door soars like a Heldentenor. Briefly, Els’s music retreats into a staggering simplicity. But two months later, he’s back to his arcane self, the lesson lost, or not so much lost as tucked away, in a whole spectrum of overtones beyond his ear’s ability to hear.
M. H. Gordon gargled Serratia and recited Shakespeare in the House of Commons, 1906, to see if speech spread germs through the air.
In the Fiat on the way back, Els resisted the urge to turn on the radio. Not that the news frightened him anymore: by the time the Apocalypse came, we’d all long since have habituated. But the ride home took only five minutes, and anything he might learn about the Libyan no-fly zone or the Fukushima radiation cloud was not worth the further atomization of his brain. Two years earlier, he’d come across the first reports about chronic focal difficulty, from a source he could no longer remember. Since then, he’d tried to take his media in nothing smaller than fifteen-minute doses.
The account of the thirty-eight-year longitudinal study had shaken him: Two researchers, one now dead, had spent thirteen thousand days in blinding tedium, testing people. The study was more rigorous than elegant. But the brute data were undeniable. Over almost four decades, people in every North American demographic had lost, on average, somewhere around one-third of their “sustained focusing interval.” The two researchers—whose names Els failed to retain—documented significant declines in how well people could filter out distractions and attend to simple tasks. The country’s collective concentration was simply shot. People couldn’t hold a thought or pursue a short-term goal for anywhere near as long as they could a few years before, back in the waning days of analog existence.
The blogs bounced the story around for half a dozen days. Then chronic focal difficulty disappeared into its own symptoms. Collapses in phytoplankton and fish populations and honeybee hives, bedbugs and cyberworms, obesity and killer flu: life was awash in too many disorders to pay any one of them more than a few minutes’ mind. But the study gave Els the same shudder he’d felt the day he first saw a list of the top one hundred terms that passed through the world’s largest search engine. Soon afterward, he began choosing silence over any kind of background listening.
In silence, he drove back home. He saw the commotion just before turning onto Linden. His first thought was that his next door neighbor had had another heart attack. Two cream-colored, windowless vans sat in Els’s drive. A sedan stretched alongside them, in the parkway. Streamers of yellow tape cordoned off his house in a geometric proof gone wrong. The repeating,
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