not happiness

My neighbor is remarkably restrained.  But when he or she is there, if they speak, I hear them. Not that I can understand every word, but I know they are there.  When there is one person there, I may hear an alarm clock or a door close.  When there are two of them I hear them talking, laughing, enjoying themselves.  And I secretly envy them for their friendship and the pleasure each takes in the other's company--a natural joy that I seem to experience less frequently with each new day. 

Yet, they don't play a loud stereo or seem to have a TV.  Thank God!  And if, rarely, I do hear more than two voices, they stop early enough in the evening so that I've really got no reason to complain.

Occasionally I hear music---thump-thump-thump-thump----from downstairs. But I cannot tell exactly where it comes from.

Then there is that odd shower--sounding like it will drown me---seeming to come from above my head.

Most days the noise of traffic from the nearby busy street is constant.

Sometimes drunk students sing and shout during the night.

A brightly illuminated billboard ( a source of income for the university) shines through
the thin curtains of my flat and often wakes me at night.

Noisiest of all is the cleaning lady who uninhibitedly shouts.  She inhabits the building during working hours from Monday to Friday.  Sometimes I feel that she is more owner-proprietor than an employee.  She is more comfortable with her presence than I am.  She seems be a stereotypically indifferent worker of the Communist period---able to carry out the assigned task with a minimum of enthusiasm and able to do what's necessary without strain.  Don't get me wrong.  I think her restrained performance is less full of bad faith than the feigned enthusiasm of an American coffee-seller, wrapped in the mumbo-jumbo language of happy consumers and individualized products.

In my building, the apartments radiate out around a central core.  That large core, containing a stairwell and elevators, is a marvellous amplifier. The voices of people on the stairs echo and are amplified.  This is disturbing and unwanted.  The cleaning lady unnerves me with her free-spirited, loud conversations.

I see dogs of all sizes pooping on the grass.  Their owners stand nearby.  They must live in a building like mine.  I cannot imagine it.  A dog of any size barking in the central core of the building would be deafening.  There are too many dogs in this city.  --Too many dogs, bicycles, roller bladers and cars.  (But cramped into small apartments, perhaps the dogs too --like their owners---yearn for weekends and holidays, trips outside of the cramped confines of the city, and the crowded apartment.  So, finally, life is lived in small portions.  You aim always at that weekend in the country or that beach-sun-sea holiday, and stop noticing the intervening misery.  --A tremendous, but necessary, act of the imagination.)

When I walk on the pedestrian path I am every bit as nervous as if I were driving on a crowded freeway.  Bicycles approach behind me, traveling fast, quietly.  It doesn't help to have rollerbladers and any other sort of swiftly moving persons.  In the end, the pedestrian path is crowded and chaotic, and a simple walk to the store is unpleasant.  The better the weather, the more crowding; and consequently I dread the arrival of real spring and summer.  I expect someday to be run down by a rollerblader or a new form of travel which allows swift, silent motion.  Or, perhaps, I shall one day only have a sore neck from constantly glancing behind me, fearful that I'll be run down. When I walk, I am in a constant state of awareness, approaching terror.  I don't want to be run down.  It's not nice....... I can't relax.

I don't like looking at the billboards along the road.  Some seem to be planted in the grass along the path, destroying any tranquility the lawns might otherwise communicate.  The billboards are garish and tasteless.  Either they represent a fantasy world or they are crude and loud with their slogans and colors.  Six or eight scantily clad beauties would entice me to a night club.  A shining car promises me happiness. An athlete wants me to use his bank. Etc., etc., And I don't like the sound of the cars flying by.  There's nothing nice about it. It is irritating. This is not beauty.

When I lived in Vienna, I lived in a building much older than the one I currently inhabit. It might have been two or three or more times as old.  In the past they did not know how to build such thin walls without the building falling down.  (Or, so I surmise.)  And consequently I did not hear my neighbors through the walls---unlike my current accomodation.  So, you see, there's an example of so-called "progress" that has nothing to do with our actual quality of life.  Like so much else in the world.

We are all of us drowning in a sea of commodities (dogs, cars, bicycles, bicycle trailers, rollerblades) while the happy shore toward which we all aim during weekends and holidays (because, after all, that's the only time we really live) recedes ever further from our grasp.  And in a frantic effort to reach the shore, we accumulate ever more vehicles and noise-makers, which only push us ever further away from our destination, now no longer even visible, but only a faint memory.  Our efforts are self-defeating, but we resent anyone who dares to point it out.