Cicadas, and the attention they take back

Somewhere around the solstice, the cicadas arrive. They are not seen at first, only heard, a high, insistent trill that begins around mid-morning and builds through the afternoon until the whole green belt of the city is vibrating. At first it is a nuisance, a sound one notices and resents. By the end of a week it has become the weather, the thing that is simply there, and one stops hearing it the way one stops hearing the traffic.

The cicada is the summer’s loudest creature and its most indifferent. It does not sing for anyone’s benefit. The trill is a call, made by a muscle that clicks a drum-like plate on the insect’s abdomen, repeated so fast it becomes a tone. Hundreds of them in a single plane tree produce a volume that ordinary conversation has to compete with, and on the hottest afternoons the sound is almost physical, a pressure in the air.

What is interesting is not the noise itself but what it does to attention. A city is designed around the idea that sound is optional: one wears headphones, closes the window, turns up the fan. The cicada is the one thing in the acoustic environment that none of this works on. The headphones help, but only for as long as one can bear to wear them; the window, closed, muffles but does not silence; the fan, at full speed, blends with the trill rather than covering it. For the first time in months, one has to live inside a sound that cannot be switched off.

The result is a small lesson in attention. Modern life is arranged so that nothing presses on the senses without consent. If the news is too much, the feed is paused. If the music is annoying, the playlist changes. The cicada says no to all of it. One cannot mute a tree. One cannot block a call from a hundred million insects doing what they evolved to do, on the hottest afternoons of the year, for the few weeks they are above ground.

And then, oddly, it becomes bearable, even comforting. The trill is constant in a way that human noise is not. It does not demand anything. It carries no news, no advertisement, no argument. It simply is, at the same volume, in the same key, for the whole of a July afternoon. After a while the mind stops bracing against it and lets it become the room tone of the summer. People on the riverside benches do not notice it at all.

By the end of the summer the cicadas will fall quiet, and one will miss them without quite knowing why. The sound is, in the end, the sound of heat and of long days and of a season at its height. It is the one thing the modern city cannot optimize, cannot shorten, cannot sell. The insects have taken the soundtrack back for a few weeks each year, and in taking it back they give everyone a small, involuntary lesson in paying attention to what is not trying to be attended to.