Culture
The Art of Complaining About Noise
A new trove of correspondence with his upstairs neighbors reveals Marcel Proust’s charming but desperate pleas for quiet.
It’s a messy business, being neighbors. For all the convivial block parties and stoop-sitting, there’s also no shortage of more teeth-gnashing (or generally mystifying) behaviors: the neighbor who blithely ignores any plea to curb her dog, for instance, or the one who seems to always haul a clunky armoire across the floor at the inkiest hours, rattling the walls.
Before subtweets or passive-aggressive griping on a neighborhood listserv, complaining about your neighbors required diplomacy and delicacy. A forthcoming volume of correspondence suggests that no one did it better than Marcel Proust.