I have been thinking about the relationship between money and silence, between money and solitude, between money and space, and about the relative definitions of luxury, what luxury means to different kinds of people. You could write a treatise about all that, but this is just a newspaper column, so I’ll boil it down to a few basic observations.

It seems to me, after long reflection and observation, that the Maltese of whatever socio-educational background use money – however long they have had it, whether they have inherited it or earned it – to buy noise, crowding, bustle, painful aesthetics, synthetic environments, and exposure to as many other people they know, and who know them, as possible (thereby buying the polar opposite of privacy). If they buy a boat, it’s to be able to join the throngs of other people they know and who know them, who have boats – mooring alongside them in the same marinas and anchoring beside them in the same overcrowded bays.

Other Europeans buy or charter yachts for the opposite reason – to gain freedom from other people and to have privacy. They go where there are as few people as possible or nobody at all, certainly nobody they know. The reasoning is that if they want people they know around them, they can always invite them to go along as guests for the duration.

One of the most precious things in this overcrowded world, where there is a barrage of sounds 24 hours a day and a constant onslaught of people, their demands and voices, is silence. And that’s why you now need rather a lot of money to buy it, whether on holiday or at home. The most expensive resorts in the world are also the most silent ones, and it’s not because few people can afford to go there. It’s because the people who go there are specifically paying for that silence.

You would think that Maltese people, living in one of the most overcrowded spaces on earth outside Calcutta and Hong Kong, with no privacy and with people in their face all day long, with a constant wall of sound made up of traffic, other people’s radio and television preferences, other people’s top-decibel conversations and construction work, would seek out the respite of perfect silence when they can. But to my consternation, I have found that your standard Maltese is completely unnerved by silence and even frightened of it.

The Maltese person who is obliged to work in a country place where there are no sounds of traffic or other people will keep the radio on at top volume, drowning out even the calming heat-haze sound of crickets, or the sound of birds in the spring. The people heading off to a quiet beach at the start of the summer, before the crowds are down, will take a sound system with them and be sure to use it. I have had people tell me, quite seriously, that they would never live in what passes for Malta’s countryside because “it’s too quiet” or “Maaaa, I would be scared”. They would rather have the constant sound of traffic and the sensation of people living on top, beneath and around them in close proximity, and walking and driving past their windows, than peace, serenity, space and a view outside their window of something other than cars, people and the neighbours’ furniture. For the price of a good, large house in peaceful surroundings they buy, instead, a flat in a block of very many, in Malta’s most congested and traffic-ridden zone, where the crowds in summer are like swarms of bees and where the only time it is quiet is between 2am and 5am, when the traffic begins again.

Holidays in silent locations are a complete no-no for Maltese people, who will rarely travel alone with their significant other or immediate family group anyway, but will insist on moving around in packs, generally with all or part of the clique with whom they socialise 300 of the 365 days a year anyway. The affluent Maltese will not take package holidays – of course not – but then they go ahead and create their own tour group, leaving the island with 15 of their closest friends. The silent resorts where Europe’s affluent people go on holiday – because the definition of a holiday is respite from noise and other people who are the afflictions of daily life – are not for the moneyed people of Malta, of whom there are astonishingly many. Malta’s affluent people seek out noise and crowds on holiday just as they do at home. If they are going to a place they fear will be rather silent, they make certain to take a (noisy) crowd with them.

One of the main reasons why life in Malta can be so unbearable is the crowding about which nothing can be done. Another one is the noise, about which plenty can be done but nothing is. The reason for that is that Maltese people have developed a complex relationship with noise and masses of other people and can’t live without either, even as they often fail to realise that these are the two main causes of extreme stress in human beings. People who are obliged to live in close proximity to crowds of strangers are constantly on the alert against attack. Stress hormones course through their body, flooding their system. They are not going to be attacked – at least not in the normal course of events – but the reaction is primitive and unconscious. It sends our anxiety levels soaring and is a main cause of the high rate of antidepressant use in people who live in crowded conditions. It is also a reason why, incidentally, flying is such a stressful experience, making people so anxious. It’s not really the fact that you’re up in the air; it’s the fact that you’re packed in among 150 total strangers and your body is signalling to you with the primitive urge to stay alert to danger from them. Don’t relax or one of them might come at you with a hunting-dagger and carve you up for supper.

My conclusion is that your average Maltese person really needs to be weaned off an addiction to noise and the constant company of hordes of other people, and taught the beauty of silence and the benefit, to the mind and spirit, of occasional solitude. It might make Maltese society as a whole less hysterical and anxious, less depressed and uncreative.

 

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