He told me he was having trouble sleeping; he couldn’t find a fan. He said he needed a fan to sleep—so he looked all over Paris, but he couldn’t find one. He said it wasn’t really because of the heat, but the silence, the silence of his room at night, in which there was no air-conditioner or radio to provide the hum, a soporific, that noise, which, as he’d gotten so accustomed to it, he could no longer do without.
Apparently the quiet is too loud; in the absence of any regular or consistent noise, he tells me, the silence is amplified; the gentle creaking of the room’s wood starts to punctuate the stretches of quiet, but does so irregularly, so that the stretches start to become audible themselves, and eventually become very loud indeed.
He says that it’s for this reason that the fan helps him sleep at night; when the fan’s on, he hears nothing but the fan, and after a while he doesn’t even hear the fan, as he’s by then sound asleep.
He wrote me: “Have you by any chance seen that Chris Marker film? It’s sort of like a film/essay. A woman narrates, reading letters sent to her by the man who’s shot the film’s footage. Each time she starts a new letter, the woman says, ‘He wrote me … .’
