April 24
That the world fares no worse, we owe half to those who lived rightly in obscurity and rest in unvisited graves.
Middlemarch (freely rendered)
Listening mode
That the world fares no worse, we owe half to those who lived rightly in obscurity and rest in unvisited graves.
Some of the good in the world consists in something not happening. A rumour reaches you and goes no further. A quarrel could have escalated, but someone leaves the sharper remark unsaid. None of it leaves anything you could point to. Even you hardly know afterwards whether your silence prevented something or whether nothing would have happened anyway.
There is a strange inequality in this. Harm can be traced back: it has a place, a time, often a name. Harm that never happens has none of these. No one can give thanks for a slight that never reached them.
You probably live amid many such acts of restraint by others without knowing of them. Some of the calm you take for granted might be made up entirely of forbearance that no one kept account of. That can be comforting. But it also makes your own care hard to measure, because it is never confirmed.
Whether your silence achieved anything that time, you will not find out. The person it concerned greets you the next morning as always.
