One of my favorite scenes in any of Éric Rohmer’s films occurs in his picaresque Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle. Two young women are spending the night in a barn. One is from Paris; the other is a country girl. The second tells the first that there is only one time during the whole day when you can hear real silence: l’heure bleue. But it is not really an hour, she explains. It is the few minutes early in the morning between when the night birds quiet down and the morning birds start singing.

“It’s hard to describe to someone who hasn’t known it,” she says.

That morning the two wake up before dawn and go out into the fields. They hear crickets, an owl, and other nocturnal creatures settling in for a long sleep. The sky is indigo, and the night is tapering into day. Suddenly the scene is broken violently by the rumble of a truck, a slammed door, a barking dog. By the time the dog shuts up, it is nearly dawn. The birds have already started twittering. It is too late. The country girl weeps.

A less graceful artist would have labored the point, but Rohmer quietly moves on to the other three adventures. I rewatched the movie recently, and it got me thinking: When was the last time I heard real silence? Have I ever?

I suspect that many of us wonder about this from time to time, before banishing the thought, lest we discover an answer we do not like. But it is worth investigating. So I sat down and performed an examen, my first in quite a while. I can’t say I am proud of what I found. But here it is all the same. Below, I’ve reconstructed, to the best of my ability, a typical day in my life, with special attention paid to its noises.

At 6:45 A.M. the alarm on my phone goes off. I hit the snooze button. It doesn’t matter: The baby is already wailing in the next room. I let her cry and unlock my phone, automatically opening various apps: the Financial Times, Fidelity, AccuWeather. I recently changed my phone’s display mode to grayscale, but this attempt at moderation has done nothing to lessen the device’s appeal. I skim headlines, look at stock futures, check the temperature in Oslo. My wife gets up to nurse the baby.

Infants are fickle. They cry, they laugh, often at the same time. We live in a townhouse, and when our next-door neighbor had a newborn, we heard the screaming at all hours. Our own daughter is also a shrieker, no matter what mood she is in. Every morning she wakes up her older sister, who, not wanting to be left out, comes bounding into the master bedroom and flops on the bed. I am still holding my phone—by now the alarm has gone off again—and I begin answering emails. I open Twitter and (for a moment) lose myself in the ebb and flow of human misery: celebrity gossip, literary spats, murders, bombings, political assassinations. Outside my window I hear the hydraulic brakes of delivery trucks, the high whine of the workman’s circular saw, the arrhythmic thundering of a jackhammer crew. It is 7:00 A.M.

A moan from my older daughter refocuses my attention. She’s hungry, she’s tired, she doesn’t want to get dressed for school. But if she doesn’t hurry up, she’s going to be late. The next half hour is an extravaganza of coaxing, pleading, threatening. I pound up and down the stairs, frantically looking for my car keys, my wallet, a hat. My older daughter whines over her yogurt. The baby pulls down the recycling bin on herself and squeals with delight as its contents clatter across the kitchen floor. I make a cup of coffee. My wife, still in her pajamas, pushes all the action toward the back door.

At last we pile into the car. I speed from our house in Northwest D.C. to the preschool in Alexandria, Virginia. The engine roars as I hit ninety on I-395. Inside the car, it is just as loud. My older daughter is chattering in the back seat about soldiers and guns. (Despite her parents’ best efforts, she somehow manages to follow foreign affairs.) The baby is practicing her vowels. She shouts ah-ah-ah and then ooh-ooh-ooh. Her older sister reaches across the row and grabs her foot. The baby screams. I scold. After about twenty minutes of this cycle, we make it to school. Incredibly, we are on time.

It would be useless to recount the rest of my day in any sequential order. Both my wife and I work from home and take turns watching the baby. If I really need to focus, I have a number of places to which I can escape. There is the university library a fifteen-minute walk from the house. I used to go there all the time, before the most recent round of freshmen, untrained in headphone etiquette, started monopolizing the study rooms, which they use for long video calls. Then there is the Dumbarton Oaks research library. I stopped going there after Harvard University commissioned an interminable renovation project; the rattle of construction clanking through my head made it impossible to think. Finally, there is a co-working space that THE LAMP rents near my house. I end up there most often. It, too, is full of noises, and they are not exactly the sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. I think of them as gray noise: office chatter, the microwave, the laser printer, air conditioning units, whirs, hums, grumbles that form a low drone that drifts over the desks and tables and out the windows onto Wisconsin Avenue.

Back home the ambient noise throbs through the house at a much higher decibel level. The dishwasher groans in the kitchen. The washer and dryer bang about in the basement. The baby bumps around the house, cheering when she finds a stray sock, howling when she knocks into a coffee table. After school, her older sister clumsily dances Odette or Titania or the Sugar Plum Fairy in the living room. And all afternoon ambulances scream past our front door, making the windows jangle and shake. Once night falls, my new neighbor, an older gentleman with a penchant for lava lamps, begins working through his daily six-pack. He is in high spirits by dinnertime and belts out a cappella selections from Bob Seger’s oeuvre. “It’s kind of sweet,” my wife says. “He thinks he’s sotto voce.”

Somehow, both kids are in bed by 8:30 P.M. The night is dour. Deafened by noise since we woke up, my wife and I are now blinded by its visual equivalent. I try to look through the packet that clunked through the mailslot earlier in the day: junk letters, catalogs, magazines. I pick up a book and attempt to read. I am distracted by emails, texts, the ineluctable impulse to scroll on a screen. When I finally do go to bed, around midnight, it is difficult to fall asleep. Old song lyrics, half-remembered tweets, the most recent dollar amount in my checking account—the day’s mental detritus drizzles down through my mind like dripping oil rain. During the night at least one of the kids awakes in tears. And so the next day begins.

This routine is probably recognizable to many of my readers. Those of us who long for the blue hour can never seem to find it. Many hardly know where to look.

It is not as if the search is getting any easier. The world has become a significantly louder place in the last thirty years. City life has expanded into suburbs and exurbs. There are more cars on the road and more planes in the sky. Telephones and computers no longer hang from kitchen walls or await our discrete queries on study desks; in their combined form, they follow us into every imaginable space. Phone conversations are shared at full volume on the street, in grocery stores, and even, I have noticed, on airplanes. Muzak, once confined to department stores and chain restaurants, plays in nearly everywhere. And don’t get me started on the video ads at the gas pump.

Health professionals warn that the increase of noise has disastrous effects on everyone who comes into contact with it. They warn of widespread hearing loss, tinnitus, and increased stress across the population. It is hard to deny that these are serious problems. But the solutions on offer seem limited, aimed more at managing the effects than addressing the problem itself. Consider, for instance, this proposal, put forward by a “sound lab,” for reclaiming quiet in your life:

Be Aware: Recognize potentially harmful noise levels in your environment.

Use Protection: Wear earplugs or noise-cancelling headphones in loud environments.

Take Breaks: Give your ears time to recover from noise exposure.

Lower the Volume: Keep personal audio devices at a moderate level.

Invest in Safe Audio Technology: Consider products designed with hearing health in mind.

Easy, right? When my kid is crying, when my neighbor is renovating his kitchen, when my day trader office mate is blaring Skrillex to psych himself up for the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange, I’ll just “be aware” and pop in some earplugs. But that’s no way to live. Try as I might, there is no way to work around noise. It’s intangible, uncontrollable. I cannot remove it from my life. I can only hope to absent myself from it.

And of course I can’t actually do that either. I can delete my personal social media accounts, but as a professional in media, I still have to interact with Twitter, Instagram, and Substack. I can dump my smartphone (as I did in college), but I am still chained to my email. I can move out of the city, out of the suburbs even, way out into the country where I can ride a tractor and keep chickens—but then I would either have to become a long-distance commuter or change my line of work entirely. My wife and I used to fantasize about moving back to the Midwest, where we met, but the pileup of personal, professional, and, increasingly, educational obligations and responsibilities makes the prospect unlikely. I envy those who can pull it off, who can remove themselves from the tyranny of noise. But I am realistic enough to recognize my lot.

Besides, I know well that if I went somewhere else, it would not be quieter, nor more peaceful. The gas pumps would still urge me to buy Doritos, my children would still throw tantrums, the images on my phone would still afflict me. Just as at the height of Rome’s power, no fugitive could escape her, so too I cannot flee my own world’s despotism. “Wherever you are,” said Cicero to the exiled Marcellus, “remember that you are equally within the power of the conqueror.”

I began this examen hoping to find one part of my day that isn’t dominated by noise. I failed. In the Rohmer movie, the two young women are luckier. They do eventually catch the blue hour. For them, it is as much a matter of luck as it is of persistence, of waking up early repeatedly to catch that breath of quiet.

“When nature’s totally silent, it’s scary,” the country girl reflects. “If the end of the world ever comes, I’m sure it’ll be at that moment.”

I think I have an inkling of what she means. Earlier this year, my older daughter begged me to take her to daily Mass before school. This required us to wake up half an hour earlier than we already do and to run through our whole morning routine at double speed. Given the usual chaos at that time in our house, I was doubtful that we would succeed in making it even once to the little city parish down the street. But she insisted, and so I said we could give it a try.

We managed to do it for about two weeks. We rolled out of bed before sunrise, dressed quickly, and arrived at Mass just as the priest was emerging from the sacristy. We always sat in the back row. My older daughter lounged on the pew while the baby practiced her vowels. Mass never ran more than twenty minutes, and afterward we drove to school at the same breakneck speed.

I won’t pretend that this Mass was all that quiet. The dozen or so blue hairs who showed up every day shuffled and whispered in the pews. The rumble of traffic outside filtered through the stained-glass windows. And the words of the Holy Sacrifice itself were pronounced in the flat, unlovely post-conciliar formulation. But when we walked out of the doors afterward, we did feel like something had happened in there. I regret the morning when I woke up late and didn’t make it. As easily as the habit was formed, it was broken.

There is something about those two weeks to which I still return. It is difficult to explain, and I would rather experience it than talk about it. At the consecration, to me it seemed as if the words themselves were breathed in silence. I have always believed that when the world ends, it will be at that moment.