The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre is most famously quoted as saying, “hell is other people.” If Sartre is to be believed, I must be dead.
Before I was born, my parents lived in Paraguay for two years. In Guarani, the native language of Paraguay, the term “kara’i’i” means “little mister” or “little old man.” Since I could talk, my mother has always called me Kara’i’i. A crank, as it were.
When I went to the Tucson Zoo as a child and saw a woman referring to a capybara as a “giant hamster,” I turned to my mother with a look of utter disgust and asked, earnestly, “is she stupid?” I was four.
When visiting my mom’s college best friend in Seattle, we walked past a booze barge full of partygoers. “They get pretty rowdy on those boats,” my mom’s friend said. I was contemptuous.
“Rowdy? You mean drunk?” I asked, offended by their noise and antics. I was seven.
Once, at the Allentown, Pennsylvania airport, I was walking towards baggage claim when a kid zipped past me on a skateboard in a crowded hallway. I was so full of wrath that I have detested skateboarders ever since. I was 14.
As a high schooler, I was frequently compared to Larry David, himself a spiteful old man. “You are just so much like him,” my high school friend Angelo Libertini once told me. I was 17.
I say all of this to let you know that I have a deep and profound hatred in my heart — a hatred that has moved me my whole life. What I hate most of all is noise and in this particular case, campus noise.
The guttural laughter I hear outside my window daily is baffling. Never in my whole life have I found anything as funny as the people cackling outside my window seem to find just about everything. I think it is all a ruse. What is so goddamn funny? Nothing — on stolen land no less? Distasteful.
I hate that one table in the Bon that always has a need to scream and shout at the top of their lungs. I especially hate that one loud person. You know exactly who I am talking about.I know you do. You probably have had similar thoughts. Maybe you have made comments to your friends as you walked past them. You know who they are.
I do not like it. Stop being so loud, nothing you have to say is something I want to hear.
I hate fire arts too. Yes I hate them. I do not like listening to them and I know you do not either. This is because you have ears.
I hate listening to loud cars booming Juice Wrld on their subwoofers. Are you 12? No, I did not think so, so knock it off. Listen to Fiona Apple instead — like an adult.
I do not like perpetual screams and shouts. What is all the fuss about? The chanting too. What is up with that?
I do not like listening to you play guitar. You know who you are. I do not think you are very good. Play free-bird. Go play in your room. Play in the Evans Music Center practice rooms. I do not care where you go. Just stop making me listen to you.
I understand that college students are allowed to make noise. I simply reject the premise that they should be allowed to make it within my general vicinity.
“But Charles, this is a college campus,” you protest.
Yes. I am aware.
“People are going to make noise.”
I know.
“People are supposed to have fun.”
Are they? I have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about this, and I have concluded that fun is overrated. Perhaps I am in the minority here. Some people seem to enjoy the sounds of other people enjoying themselves. They hear laughter and think, “How nice. People are having a good time.” Perhaps they hear someone playing guitar and think, “Wow, someone is expressing themselves through music.” They hear a car blasting utter nonsense at two in the morning and think nothing.
I hear these things and think: Why?
There are, of course, certain noises that are unavoidable. A fire alarm, for instance. The people have to smoke weed and burn ramen. I have made my peace with fire alarms. The wind makes noise. Rain makes noise. Birds make noise. These things are part of nature, and even quite lovely.
As Plato noted, however, people have free will. That is what makes it so upsetting.
You choose to laugh that loudly. You choose to bring your guitar outside. And inside. You know who you are. You specifically, not guitarists whom I generally have nothing but respect for.
You choose to drive a car equipped with speakers apparently designed for producing Havana syndrome. You hooligans, you ruffians. You could have simply not done any of these things. And yet you did.
This is what I cannot forgive.
I recognize, too, that there is a certain hypocrisy in my position. I had a room in Odell where anyone having a piss could hear everything. I have lived in a dorm for years. I have had friends over. I have talked loudly. I have laughed, though only when the situation demanded it.In fact, once, last year, when walking around Platt Residence Hall with a friend, a voice screeched at me: “Shhhhh some people are trying to sleep!”
I am awful, I know — hoisted on my own petard.
This is different, of course. This is because the rules I made up in my head apply to you and not me. I am sorry, but I do make the rules in this case.
The problem, really, is that I have no interest in negotiating with the world around me. I do not negotiate with terrorists. I would simply prefer that the world become quieter. Only when I want that is, yoohoo, what about me? I do not want to hear your conversation. I do not want to hear your music. I do not want to hear your laughter. I do not want to know that you are having a better time than I am.
And perhaps that is the real problem.
The campus is full of people who are young, happy and loud. They have friends. They have guitars. They have cars. They have parties. They laugh at things that I do not find funny.
Meanwhile, I am standing in my room, listening to all of it through the wall, wondering why everyone has decided to be so happy. Perhaps it feels like everyone else has been in on something my whole life. Maybe I am missing out, maybe I don’t get it.
Originally, my high school yearbook quote was from the TV show, “Mad Men.” It got cut for being too long.
“I had a dream I was on a shelf in the refrigerator. Someone closes the door and the light goes off, and I know everybody’s out there eating. And then they open the door and you see them smiling. And they’re happy to see you, but maybe they don’t look right at you and maybe they don’t pick you. And then the door closes again. The light goes off,” the quote reads.
Maybe Ziad feels very differently.
Or, maybe Sartre was right.
“Hell is other people.”
But I have learned something since arriving at college that Sartre never had the opportunity to experience: Hell is other people with a Bluetooth speaker — myself not included.
So, please, for the love of God, keep it down. I have moping to do.
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