Cruising Cruising

I can hear the subtle rumble of cars going by. Once in a while a noisier one goes by. Like I said, I can hear that.

Here's the weird thing about sound, hearing it. I read this somewhere. Sound comes at you in waves. OK, it's something like this. The source of the sound makes a noise, in this case the rumbling of an engine. That noise takes the form then of waves coming toward you. Another way to think of them is that they're vibrations.

Here's the scary part. If you can hear them hitting your ears, they're hitting your ears as those vibratory waves. That wasn't the scary part. Here it is: If you can hear them, the same waves are affecting your house. The door is hearing them, in a sense, that the vibration is hitting it and disturbing it, however subtly. The mirror. Your computer. Everything that is in the path of those waves.

It would get scarier if you lived close to a railroad track. The vibrations then could make things shift around on your shelf. Or worse, could, over time, loosen up the foundation of your house. Then some night a train is cruising by and the foundation, loosened up, gives way and the ceiling falls on you.

Then when your house collapses it makes a terrible crashing noise, which affects everyone around within earshot. It may make their house collapse too, then that one the next one, and on and on, till the whole world at last gives way.