Dad: “What is it, Ben?”

Ben: “I’m just.” Dad: “Worried?”

Ben: “Well.”  Dad: “About what?” Ben: “I guess about my future.” Dad: “What about it?”

Ben: “I don’t know.  I want it to be….”  Dad: “To be what?”

Ben: “Different.”

Like many, many other people, i am a huge fan of the Graduate (1967).  Perhaps unlike the  average viewer, i find Elaine (Katharine Ross) tiresome. Nonetheless, Benjamin’s post-collegiate adult extended-adolescence, his awkwardness with Mrs. Robinson, the plasticity of his days, the way that almost every shot is prescient and overdetermined, and mostly, what the beautiful, jangly version of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” alerts viewers to in the first minute of the film–its keen ability to listen.  The volume of mundane daily life is how we understand his discord with his surroundings. We hear the loudspeaker at the airport when Benjamin first returns to L.A. obnoxiously “interrupting” the soundtrack, bubbles in a fishtank, his flippers smacking the linoleum floor, his ill-timed whimpers and groans of discomfort, and, of course, his Darth Vader-y breathing inside the scuba suit that mutes all other sound.

At night, after my son goes to sleep, i put my headphones on while i work, but i always pull one ear to the side so that i can hear him if he coughs or rolls out of bed or has a bad dream. i can hear the traffic on McGuinness, too, which seems to get louder at night. My neighbors screaming at each other in Polish. My cat begging for a second dinner. And in my covered ear, songs, splitting my thoughts. A soundtrack that i choose to hear as a hope for something different. The sounds marking a silence more present in its absence than any (other) real company could offer.