A public service message

by David Benjamin

“Even fools are thought wise if they keep silent, and discerning if they hold their tongues.” —Proverbs 17:28

PARIS.—Lately in airport lounges, I’m feeling a little snakebit, or—more accurately—phone-battered. On my way here, in the “Admiral’s Club,” I found a comfortable chair, with a nearby table and only one neighbor. I had space and, I thought, a measure of solitude—until I returned to me seat with a little food and drink. Suddenly, I was engulfed in a logorrheic torrent. My neighbor, young, male and voluble, was talking up a storm, into his mouthpiece, at eighty steady decibels.

Immediately, I thought of a character in Spider John Koerner’s “Rent Party Rag,” Loud Lyle, who “talks with a lot of volume.”

It also came to me, perhaps for the thousandth time, that for the sake of every human being’s peace of mind, a telephone should be a stationary object tethered to a wall in a private place.

Loud Lyle, as I came to know him, was some sort of day trader, studying “the market,” dispensing advice to the unseen victim of his erudition. He rattled on with the misplaced confidence of a math whiz at the blackjack table. He might have had a job. I think he mentioned a child. He might have been somewhat capable in his vaguely discernible career path. But none of this mattered to me, or anyone within range—twenty to thirty feet—of his inescapable, immodulable voice.

In a sense, Loud Lyle was a remarkable, although increasingly common species of millennial homo sapiens, the smartphone solipsist. Surrounded though he was by some two dozen people, closely arranged and compelled to hear his every uttered inanity, he was insensate to our presence. I was to him—as were my fellow sufferers—little more distinct than a figure dabbed by Monet, an impressionist blur faceless, featureless, distant and merely ornamental.

Had I been been able to stifle my upbringing and attain, however briefly, a selfishness as intrusive and rude as that of Loud Lyle, I would have ripped his high-tech earphone/microphone device from him, tightened it around his neck and said something like the following:

“Look around you, asshole.

“You are in the midst of strangers. There is a certain comfort, even pleasure, in being a stranger among strangers. That man over there is strange to me, but I don’t know what is particularly strange about him compared to me. I don’t want to know. He’s a mystery to me—all of us are a mystery to one another—without need of a solution. If any of us have secrets, we know we are safe from having to reveal them to anyone among us, because we are strangers coming and going, destined to disperse, leaving one another—never to be seen again—behind.

“Try to focus on this: You don’t have to share your conversation with strangers, and they don’t want to listen. You don’t want them to know anything about you. They don’t want to know.

“This is known as minding your own business. There are few human imperatives more basic than to remember that thou shalt not inflict yourself on strangers. Of course, there are extraordinary circumstances …

“ … a crowded elevator trapped between floors

“ … a sinking ocean liner

“ … a fire breaking out in the movies

“ … a bartender.

“Loud Lyle (if you don’t mind me calling you that), you are apparently oblivious to an unspoken code that has—since time immemorial—governed and reconciled the millions of strangers forced daily into close proximity. You are sharing unrelentingly, damn near the top of your lungs, a monolog that no one in this room, or anyone on earth—look around! We’re in total strangers, Lyle!—wants you to share.

“You are dispensing information without context, narrative or wit that makes no sense to anyone but you. You’re exposing the boring fragment of a dull life with which we, up to this tiresome moment, have had no contact, and with which none of us will ever, in our lives, have any contact after you’ve departed this space to leave us all in blissful peace.

“Lyle, it’s worse than that. You’re not only conveying information that is to us (and probably to you) incoherent and pointless, you are distracting us from our own solitary, silent and secret pursuits. If we are texting, thinking, reading, eating or drinking something that has nothing to do with you, we are struggling to do so over the sound of your voice. Though your incessant babble grates on our nerves, we have no choice but to listen, or to somehow block our ears, or to flee to a far corner if there is, God willing, a corner far enough to escape what Shakespeare called ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’

“Our remedy, were we forced by desperation to unite and vote on the issue, would be to seize you and hold you down while our compatriot strangers stomp your broadcast medium into a voiceless, harmless metallic blot on the carpet.

“Were we to resort to this unlikely reprisal, it might dawn on you that you ought not carry on privately in a public place, disturbing the tranquility of this public space, without the consent of the public.

“Or, as translated from the Latin by Thomas Carlyle, “Silence is golden.”

“Or, as once said by Maurice Switzer, but attributed to both Abe Lincoln and Mark Twain, “It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.”

“In other words, Lyle, please, shut the fuck up.”

Of course, I didn’t try to breach Loud Lyle’s wall of sound. Like all the strangers around me, I waited him out, thrilled to see him pack up his briefcase, sighed with relief as he headed toward the elevator. His voice was still going, of course, keeping a steady but fading drone in our ears until, hallelujah, the elevator doors slid shut …

… Where, everyone inside that cabled cube with Loud Lyle, suddenly felt a stab of dread that the power would fail, and they would be stuck between the lounge and the concourse. After an hour or so of Lyle describing his plight over the phone in redundant, excruciating, acoustic detail, they would have to do what any civilized group of strangers would come to, reluctantly but unanimously.

They would kill him.