So pretty to think of it so. But in fact, by choosing to spend so much time in my workshop yesterday, I was giving myself the opportunity not only to get this quilt finished, but also the opportunity to listen to my neighbors' workpeople attach a new roof to their house. Well, it's noisy, but it's a limited time issue, and it has to be done, and better to do it (I guess) in the sun than in the rain, although the temperature in this sun on a roof must be highly debilitating or at least dehydrating. So that's all right. But accompanying the hammers were the steady barks of the neighbor dogs. Were I to walk out on my porch, absolute barking hysteria erupted. Were anyone to come by, or to walk by, or to bike by, all the same. And after a spell of barking, the dogs are joined by their owner, who yells into the summer afternoon at them to stop, which they do not.
Eventually, they go inside and quiet returns, but by then, I have left the workshop and am somewhere where I can't hear them quite as well anyway. But there you have it, a quilt made not with quiet and calmness, but one that includes, at least in the final hours, constant noise from without and irateness from within. Somehow, I think that calling the law to report excessive barking of dogs is not going to turn out well if the law is the owner of the dogs. I'm thinking of investing in a voice activated recorder. Then I will make a 24-hour recording of one of those days when the dogs go at it unrelentingly. Then I will submit it to a notary to document its authenticity. And then I will send the tapes anonymously with the notary's sealed paper to the higher law. Or maybe it's time to deal with a journalist who has a shield for the anonymous source. Nudge, nudge; wink, wink.
Or maybe not. This afternoon, I am reading Alain De Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy, and, as it happens, after lunch I started on his chapter on the Stoics. This is Seneca's advice, via De Botton, about being in the vicinity of excessive noise: "To calm us down in noisy streets, we should trust that those making a noise know nothing of us. . . . We should not import into scenarios where they don't belong pessimistic interpretations of others' motives. Thereafter, noise will never be pleasant, but it will not have to make us furious." (Ital. added) Well, I didn't think that the dogs' owner was tolerating the noise in order to drive me crazy, but rather was tolerating the noise because he didn't care whether I was driven crazy or because he didn't notice that it was a crazy-making noise. However, I recognized Seneca's advice as well advised: "All outdoors may be bedlam, provided that there is no disturbance within." So, I hope the guy will work with his dogs to quiet them down, and in the meanwhile, I'll work with my within to reduce disturbance.
