A Snippet

 

“Oh, this overbred passion for quiet! Totally unnatural. We are usually begotten with a certain amount of noise. and For our first nine months we are carried in the womb in a positive hubbub—the loud tom-tom of the heart, the croaking and gurgling of the guts, which must sound like the noise of the rigging on a sailing ship, and the mother’s loud laughter—can you imagine what that must be like to Little Nemo, lurching and heaving in his watery bottle while the diaphragm hops up and down? Why are children noisy? Because, literally, they’re bred to it. People find fault with their kids when they say they can do their homework better while the radio is playing, but the kids are simply trying to recover the primal racket in which they learned to be everything from a blob, to a fish, to a human creature. Silence is entirely a sophisticated, acquired taste. Silence is anti-human.”

Once again I'm re-reading THE REBEL ANGELS by Robertson Davies. It's set in a Canadian University and I find the dialogue between academics delightful.