Implication

"If you give a congressman a cookie" reminded me of a Lionel Trilling essay, "Manners, Morals, and the Novel." (1947) I don't have anything particularly interesting to say about the essay, I just frequently think of it when writing blog and journal entries:

Somewhere below all the explicit statements that a people make through its art, religion, architecture, legislation, there is a dim mental region of intention of which it is very difficult to become aware. We now and then get a strong sense of its existence when we deal with the past, not by reason of its presence in the past but by reason of its absence. As we read the great formulated monuments of the past, we notice that we are reading them without the accompaniment of something that always goes along with the formulated monuments of the past. The voice of multifarious intention and activity is stilled, all the buzz of implication which always surrounds us in the present, coming to us from what never gets fully stated, coming in the tone of greetings and the tone of quarrels, in slang and humor and popular songs, in the way children play, in the gesture the waiter makes when he puts down the plate, in the nature of the very food we prefer.

Some of the charm of the past consists of the quiet -- the great distracting buzz of implication has stopped and we are left only with what has been fully phrased and precisely stated. And part of the melancholy of the past comes from our knowledge that the huge, unrecorded hum of implication was once there and left no trace -- we feel that because it is evanescent it is especially human. We feel, too, that the truth of the great preserved monuments of the past does not fully appear without it. From letters and diaries, from the remote, unconscious corners of the great works themselves, we try to guess what the sound of the multifarious implication was and what it meant.

Actually, the rest of the essay veers off into discussion of morals and the modern novel. The paragraphs above are really just Trilling's introduction to his topic. I like the term "multifarious implication" and I like how he describes how it affects our relationship to the past. It's not that the idea itself is original, just the writing.

It reminds me how incomprehensible our blog entries may appear in the future, without footnotes.