I'm finally reading Everything is Miscellaneous and I love how it's messing with my perceptions of IM. But for now I want to zero in on something I've just read in Chapter 8, "What Nothing Says". I've never really stopped to think about my deep desire to make the implicit explicit -- to put into words that which can't really be said. The book uses a great example from the movie High Fidelity -- John Cusak tries detailing some of his reasoning behind his playlists, but he isn't able to explain it to the tape's recipient. Even if he could, a statement of that reasoning wouldn't have the same effect as listening to the songs would. The explicit often diminishes the implicit. Here's another great example -- the author says "I'll never be able to tell you everything I know about my children. What I know about my children is too long and deep to be exhausted in words, too twisty, entangled and interwingled to be made completely explicit."
The implicit is life. I may try to describe it in my numerous blog posts, but it never quite captures how I feel about the subject matter. Words just don't give life justice. Yet we spend a great deal of our lives relying on words to communicate with one another. I feel like I'm not able to truly express myself if I can't say what I'm feeling and this is wrong. There's beauty in the implicit and there's nothing wrong with leaving it there.
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