The susurration of the breeze in the tall grasses vs. the city's incessant sound, now violent and jagged, now falling into unfinished rhythms, but endless and remorseless

You finish individual books more quickly if you read them one at a time but I have always been partial to reading multiple books at the same time. I find that there are interesting cross-connections to be made that you might not otherwise notice when reading sequentially. In this case, there is a pairing between a passage in Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann and Death in Holy Orders by P.D. James.

From Lippmann, in Chapter Five.

In the laboratory the fatigue is slight enough, the distraction rather trivial. Both are balanced in measure by the subject's interest and self-consciousness. Yet if the beat of a metronome will depress intelligence, what do eight or twelve hours of noise, odor, and heat in a factory, or day upon day among chattering typewriters and telephone bells and slamming doors, do to the political judgments formed on the basis of newspapers read in street-cars and subways? Can anything be heard in the hubbub that does not shriek, or be seen in the general glare that does not flash like an electric sign? The life of the city dweller lacks solitude, silence, ease. The nights are noisy and ablaze. The people of a big city are assaulted by incessant sound, now violent and jagged, now falling into unfinished rhythms, but endless and remorseless. Under modern industrialism thought goes on in a bath of noise. If its discriminations are often flat and foolish, here at least is some small part of the reason. The sovereign people determines life and death and happiness under conditions where experience and experiment alike show thought to be most difficult. "The intolerable burden of thought" is a burden when the conditions make it burdensome. It is no burden when the conditions are favorable. It is as exhilarating to think as it is to dance, and just as natural.

Every man whose business it is to think knows that he must for part of the day create about himself a pool of silence. But in that
helter-skelter which we flatter by the name of civilization, the citizen performs the perilous business of government under the worst possible conditions. A faint recognition of this truth inspires the movement for a shorter work day, for longer vacations, for light, air, order, sunlight and dignity in factories and offices. But if the intellectual quality of our life is to be improved that is only the merest beginning. So long as so many jobs are an endless and, for the worker, an aimless routine, a kind of automatism using one set of muscles in one monotonous pattern, his whole life will tend towards an automatism in which nothing is particularly to be distinguished from anything else unless it is announced with a thunderclap. So long as he is physically imprisoned in crowds by day and even by night his attention will flicker and relax. It will not hold fast and define clearly where he is the victim of all sorts of pother, in a home which needs to be ventilated of its welter of drudgery, shrieking children, raucous assertions, indigestible food, bad air, and suffocating ornament.

Occasionally perhaps we enter a building which is composed and spacious; we go to a theatre where modern stagecraft has cut away distraction, or go to sea, or into a quiet place, and we remember how cluttered, how capricious, how superfluous and clamorous is the ordinary urban life of our time. We learn to understand why our addled minds seize so little with precision, why they are caught up and tossed about in a kind of tarantella by headlines and catch-words, why so often they cannot tell things apart or discern identity in apparent differences

From Death in Holy Orders, the protagonist, Adam Dalgliesh, a police Commander in London is on his way to investigate a murder out in the countryside of East Anglia.

Leaving the tow, he took side roads and then a rutted and over-grown lane just wide enough for the Jaguar. There was an open gate giving a wide view over the autumn fields and here he parked to eat his picnic. But first he turned off his mobile phone. Leaving the car, he leaned against the gatepost and shut his eyes to listen to the silence. These were the moments he craved in an over-busy life, the knowledge that no one in the world knew exactly where he was or could reach him. The small, almost indistinguishable sounds of the countryside came to him on the sweet-smelling air, a distant unidentifiable birdsong, the susurration of the breeze in the tall grasses, the creaking of a branch over his head. After he had finished his lunch he walked vigorously down the lane for a half-mile, then returned to the car and made his way back to the A12 and towards Ballard's Mere.

Public Opinion was published in 1922, seventy-nine years before Death in Holy Orders. I have no reason to believe that James was aware of Lippmann's work. And yet her passage is a neat bookend to Lippman's observation.