I felt as if I were levitating off the bed, vibrating to a great urban overture, like those bright, brassy chords that introduce Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” or maybe the beginning of a percussion-heavy piece by Xenakis. If you live in New York, I can understand how this kind of racket might drive you bats sometimes, but to me it was a revelation. The city was already awake and thrumming, going about its business with none of the suburban fussiness that makes it unmannerly, for example, to crank up your lawn mower or your leaf blower before breakfast. This was followed by some bus rumbling and horn honking and, a few blocks away, an insistent car alarm. Racket noise tv#But a couple of years ago I happened to spend the night at an Upper East Side hotel, where I was pleasantly startled by two phenomena: the abundant free pornography on cable TV and, around dawn, a whining, grinding, masticating sound that I eventually recognized as a garbage truck partaking of its morning feed. The only thing you hear is the occasional scrabbling of raccoons trying to knock over the trash cans. LIKE most commuters, I spend my days in the city but sleep out in the stillness of the suburbs, where at night it’s as quiet as the grave.
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