Noise Control

Quiet has never come easily to Americans.

More than a century ago, Oscar Wilde labeled us “the noisiest country that ever existed.”

Today, the volume is certainly higher--and it probably didn’t help when the Environmental Protection Agency closed its noise-control department in 1982.

Still, psychologists and other students of silence say people need periodic quiet. A few tips for finding it:

* Start small. “If you’re just beginning, take five minutes a day and go outside and find a nice, beautiful place and just think about things,” says Albert Mehrabian, a professor emeritus of psychology at UCLA.

* Turn off the car radio every now and then.

* Ban television one day a week, and replace it with reading, thinking or maybe a game of Scrabble.

* Go on a silent retreat. Catholics, Episcopalians and Buddhists are among the denominations that commonly offer them.

* Try a quiet activity, such as gardening, that allows the mind to wander.

* Take a walk, tune into nature--and leave the Walkman at home.

Remember, as Pascal once said, “All human evil comes from . . . a person’s inability to sit still in a room.”