"Wide awake behind closed eyes"

Sound Tim Parks on the search for true silence:

"It was humiliating. Wide awake behind closed eyes, struggling to focus on tensions I couldn't find, the words went on and on. Now I was remembering a bad review from years before. Word for word! I writhed. Until finally, the obvious occurred to me: all that noise in the world outside serves precisely to drown out the noise in our heads. To reach any deep silence we must tackle this inner noisiness first."

The only time I ever seem to enjoy a near-silent world is late at night when all the sound I can hear is the distant ticking of a clock, the hum of a freezer and perhaps the cooling fan of my PVR recording something on BBC Four. Sadly, I'm also too tired to enjoy it for very long. Unless some drunk people are shouting in the park outside, then I'm wide awake.  And swearing, probably.