The Unspoken
“If you want to be happy, be.”
That line by the great Tolstoy intrigues me. It intrigues me, especially for all it doesn’t say.
Let’s fill in those missing words. “If you want to be happy, all you have to do is to decide to be happy.” Or even more succinctly, “If you want to be happy, be happy.” All three statements are the same . . . and yet they aren’t.
The “all you have to do” statement lays its meaning out clearly. So clearly that I’m barely compelled to think. The “be happy” statement might catch my attention more strongly, but once it does, little is required of me.
“If you want to be happy, be,” with its unexpected elision, pulls me in. I am forced to pause, to pay attention . . . to think. The statement surprises me, too. It has the added impact of trading on the larger meaning of the word be as though Tolstoy might also be saying that to be happy you have only to exist, to be alive.
However we frame it, Tolstoy’s message keeps reverberating.
Visual artists work with white space as intentionally as with line and color. Musicians set their notes against silence, silence being as important to music as any sound. Poets play with the shape of the line against the blank page. Filmmakers use scene cuts to enhance their narrative. The next time you watch a movie, notice how the action rises and rises and—just when we know exactly what will happen next, what must happen—the scene cuts and we move on. A good script never tells us what we already know.
Fiction writers have a lot of freedom with language, but our power lies in being as intentional about the words we leave out as we are about those we put in.
In the mid-twentieth century, Hemingway changed not just the language of fiction, but story itself. Clean, spare language has been the standard ever since, no piling on adjectives. Clean, spare stories, too. Contemporary readers demand stories that don’t explain.
In 1987, my novel On My Honor won a Newbery Honor Award. More important than the award, though, year after year, that book has been taken up by teachers for their classrooms. There are some perfectly mundane reasons for that. The story is short, just under 100 pages, an easy fit for the curriculum. The language is straightforward and comprehensible for a wide range of young readers, too. And in a world where teachers are too often vulnerable to attack, it’s a fairly safe choice. (Fairly safe, I say, though not entirely. As much, I’m convinced, for its wide exposure as for its content, On My Honor spent many years on ALA’s list of most banned books.)
I would suggest, though, that there is another reason for that particular story’s finding a place in so many classrooms. The events portrayed are believable, relatable, of great significance, and well worth thought and discussion.
And . . . readers are left to find answers in their own hearts to the questions posed.
It is the unspoken that gives stories their power.
“If you want to be happy, be.”
