The Quiet Ones
My life has been a search for quiet for as long as I can remember.<p>I think the fundamental problem with noisy people is not that they're inconsiderate, but that they don't have any train of thought to interrupt, and they thus don't realize the havoc they're wreaking.<p>When I was living in Providence, working on <i>On Lisp</i>, I told my loud but well-meaning neighbors that I was writing a hard computer book, and that made them be quiet.  Ordinary people can understand that you need quiet if you're working on some specific, hard task, like doing math homework.  What they don't grasp is that someone would want their mind to work that way all the time, as a matter of course.