What's left out

Every time we say something, we also conceal, in the instant we put it into words, everything outside it, by choosing not to put it into words.... The act of using words is always accompanied by a partial shadowing.

Takeo Doi, Japanese psychoanalyst,
 quoted by Gish Jen in The Girl at the Baggage Claim

Witnesses in trials may swear to tell "the whole truth," but of course they never really do. All truth, to some extent, is selective truth. Something told is something withheld. Lawyers, in fact, often block attempts by witnesses to tell the whole truth, insisting that they limit their answer to either yes or no or address only the specific question asked.

Gish Jen

As a newspaper reporter I had to be selective not just about what I put first in a story but about what I put into it at all. Space was limited, and some of the things that occurred at a city council meeting, for example, seemed more important than others. Some "news" never made the newspaper. That's the value of having a variety of news sources. Different reporters report news differently.

In her book The Girl at the Baggage Claim, Gish Jen devotes a few pages to this idea, expressed by Takeo Doi, that "using words is always accompanied by a partial shadowing." She discusses it in terms of two notable works of American literature, Walden by Henry David Thoreau and Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard.

Reading Walden we get the idea that Thoreau lived in isolation in a cabin at Walden Pond and had to depend upon his own resourcefulness to get by. In truth, the pond was just a short walk from Concord. He frequently went into town and had regular visitors from town. It has been suggested that he took his laundry to his mother.

Dillard did something similar, giving the impression she was living alone in the wild. In truth, she lived with her husband, but chose not to mention him in her book. The "incredible wilderness" she wrote about "was a stretch of woods near Hollins College," Jen writes.

So were Thoreau and Dillard being deceptive? Probably. But does what they chose not to say in their books detract from the value of what they did say? That is the more difficult question.

Those who write autobiographies and memoirs always leave something out, and not just those things they can't remember. Some memories seem trivial, others might embarrass either the author or some other person.

That which is left out of a book, a news story or a testimony before court or Congress will always be less serious than that which is included but untrue.