A meme is circulating on social media in response to people enjoying the weather, pointing out that rather than the assumed four seasons, there are actually 11, of which we are entering the second: Winter, Fool’s spring, Second winter, Spring of deception, Third winter, Mud season, Actual spring, Summer, False autumn, Second summer and Actual autumn. In the less brutal of these, I get off the train a few stops early on my way to work and walk along the canal listening to a podcast. It has become clear that this is the only way I can concentrate – when it’s just me, a goose and the good morning smell of marijuana. But it’s also made me realise that when I’m listening to something on headphones, I’m not entirely here.
There are infinite reviews of books, music and podcasts, but rarely will someone review the experience of listening. A modern review might acknowledge, for example, that listening to this in motion during an autumnal shower you will feel like Buster Keaton as the front of a house falls down on him. The combination of emotions and dialect will propel the listener to work in a cloud of brick dust, leaving them standing shakily with a window frame around their feet wondering how they got there. Why do we not talk about this more? The dizzying effect of a stranger whispering into your ear?
This week I’ve been listening to an audiobook, and the experience has grizzled and slapped me about. Reading a novel, one’s eyes remain focused on the black and white page, but listening to one allows a level of disassociated roaming, the effect of which for me has been a merging of truths. I will reach the steps by the bridge and be quickly struck with the memory of having broken up with my boyfriend at the top, before consciously recalibrating to pin this down in fact as simply the place I was yesterday when the characters broke up in my book. I have new memories of love blossoming at traffic lights, and abuse centred around the biscuit aisle of my local Sainsbury’s. It sounds like nothing, maybe, but for me it’s adding a disconcerting element of virtual reality to my morning commute. There is a danger to it.
Of all the clues that I’m getting old, the sight of young people permanently plugged into their headphones is the most confusing. Everywhere, the chattering of mouths into phones that aren’t there, the animated discussion happening between a single person. Headphones the size of croissants, or wireless buds surely begging to fall into a busy road, all ears full, at all times, everywhere. These people appear to be living normal lives, buying fruit, reading messages, savouring the brief joys of a meal-deal’s dessert. And yet, all the time there is somebody singing or talking into their ears. All the time!
Me, no. Me, when I am listening to a podcast, I am sitting there on the producer’s lap. I am sitting there on Jon Ronson’s knee as he gently asks a man about his wife’s death. I am propped up in bed with Dan Savage’s caller as she considers how to ask her boyfriend to treat her more like a baby. I am thinking bitter chauvinistic thoughts as I sit between a pair of women giggling about murder. In my This American Life phase I thought of my headphones as a tool for crying with, as inevitably I would arrive at my destination striped with mascara and need to do some breathing exercises quickly by the sinks. Is it like this for everyone? When I see somebody on the bus singing heartily along to their playlist I think it might be, but other times I worry it points to a simpleness in my brain. I drown in these things.
Maybe it’s because I’m so used to doing three things at a time, damping down the constant ache to click away, that the experience of listening properly is so overwhelming. Maybe it’s the relaxing meditation of a voice almost whispering, or the pace of a podcast, uncommon to a digital age. Maybe it’s that these stories mean I can never be alone, or maybe it’s the uncommon intimacy of having a story read to me. I read a lot of stories out loud, including one last week to a class of children, with a boy who, at the end, asked, “Will the postman be OK?” The story had not featured a postman; I said “yes” with feeling.
Every evening a bedtime story will provide some rhyming resolution to the day just gone, and then the lights are turned off, and then goodnight. I am returning the favour to myself, with a brisk Irish accent telling me what the trees looked like that warm day in September, a dry American writer crowbarring open my ideas of what a relationship is for, an Australian investigator who will not let it lie. This is the season to succumb to a stranger’s voice, for taking your book outside and letting it walk us somewhere new.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman