Terry Pratchett writes about this, how there is a difference between the sound of someone not being there and the sound of someone hiding and not making any noise.
He often writes about how things like bird song can be a type of silence and how a train that always passes at the same time every night, not passing at that time, can wake you up from its absence.
I used to live right next to a big ol’ belltower. It’d chime every hour and on special days, it’d be chiming throughout the day. A friend came to stay and was baffled at how I could sleep and work through it all
I grew up half a block from elevated railroad tracks and it’s the same. People visiting kept noticing the trains going by regularly, but I’d been tuning it out all my life and had to work to consciously hear it.
Later in life I visited my childhood home as an adult, and spent the night. It had been long enough since I’d left that I began noticing the damn trains, and I had trouble getting to sleep.
Terry Pratchett writes about this, how there is a difference between the sound of someone not being there and the sound of someone hiding and not making any noise.
He often writes about how things like bird song can be a type of silence and how a train that always passes at the same time every night, not passing at that time, can wake you up from its absence.
I used to live right next to a big ol’ belltower. It’d chime every hour and on special days, it’d be chiming throughout the day. A friend came to stay and was baffled at how I could sleep and work through it all
I grew up half a block from elevated railroad tracks and it’s the same. People visiting kept noticing the trains going by regularly, but I’d been tuning it out all my life and had to work to consciously hear it.
Later in life I visited my childhood home as an adult, and spent the night. It had been long enough since I’d left that I began noticing the damn trains, and I had trouble getting to sleep.