SLAMMING doors, banging walls, bellowing strangers and
whistling neighbors were the bane of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s
existence. But it was only in later middle age, after he had moved with his
beloved poodle to the commercial hub of Frankfurt, that his sense of being
tortured by loud, often superfluous blasts of sound ripened into a
philosophical diatribe. Then, around 1850, Schopenhauer pronounced noise to be
the supreme archenemy of any serious thinker.