Some years ago, I was asked to mind a house in inner Melbourne, so for weeks I rattled around in a boom-period mansion of 11 large rooms. Nervous at night, I took myself in hand: 'They've got to find me first,' I told myself when thinking of would-be intruders.
The other reason for nerves was the noise level: in the Greek village house I had been without a phone for ten years, and the most common sounds were those of donkeys sobbing in the olive groves and tractors grinding along the street.
In the Melbourne house there were numerous phones, so that I never knew which one to answer. There were also machines that I was ignorant of, but which emitted noise very regularly: the air conditioner, various exhaust fans, the enormous freezer, the fax machine, the intercom, the house alarm. The whole building gave out a constant hum, even in the days before the computer ping of email.
I realised then that I had spent a quiet childhood: in the country township we had no car, no refrigerator, little background noise apart from birdsong. When we listened to the wireless it was with a purpose, for a particular program. As for other noise, we made our own when the spirit moved us: piano, violin, our singing voices. In between we had our quiet interludes: sometimes my mother would demand what she called 'a drop of hush'.
The human brain has always needed silence, and there have always been people who needed solitude, at least for certain periods. In 1948 war hero and adventurer Patrick Leigh Fermor (pictured) retreated to a French monastery simply in order to write. But the experience of silence was an unexpected bonus.
At first he found it simply depressing, and was prey to terrible feelings of loneliness and flatness. But eventually freed from what he termed the 'automatic drains' of talk, movement and nervous expression, he found a unique and restorative freedom that enabled him to work and eventually produce A Time To Keep Silence.
Life was simpler then. Now, as well as other sources of noise, we have what British-American writer and self-confessed web freak Andrew Sullivan calls 'online clamour' to contend with. In 2016, fearing a breakdown as a result of what he terms living in the web, and apparently doing little else in the way of living, Sullivan booked himself into a retreat, which involved separation from his iPhone,