On the wonder of nuance

In reading the latest issue of The American Scholar, I engaged with two articles that reminded me of the importance of nuance -- subtle shades of meaning that reveal equally subtle thoughts. As an editor, I've internalized this importance, and spend much of my day grappling with how to choose the optimal nuance to communicate an author's thoughts. But sometimes it's necessary to take a step back and think about what one's been doing unconsciously, thereby having an opportunity to reawaken the wonder that lies in the subtlety of thought, for which words are only an anemic proxy.

In the first article, Confessing and Confiding, Emily Fox Gordon tells us of a writer's exercise she has tried with her students. The exercise relies on clarifying a nuance that non-writers might fail to grasp, and that many writers ignore, namely the difference between confessing and confiding. This might lead us to an entirely different essay, about the difference between denotation, the dictionary definition of a word, and connotation, which reflects how the word has come to be used, often quite differently from its denotation. I'll reserve that for some future essay. Here, I'll focus on the concept of nuance and where it can lead us.

In modern English, confess has acquired a strong connotation related to power differentials: it implies admitting to an act, possibly a crime, before superiors who have the power to judge you and who, from context, will do so once your confession is complete. Your admission may be voluntary or coerced, it may be shamed and penitent or hubristic and unrepentant, and it may be honest or dishonest, but in all cases, it represents a surrender to another person's or group's judgment. In contrast, confide means to share something (whether mundane or a revelation) with someone you are treating as an equal. Confiding in someone is an act of trust, in the tacit agreement that this "confidence" should be kept private and not widely shared, and it is a deliberate attempt to close the inevitable distance between any two people. To exaggerate the point, this is the difference between tabloid "journalism" and a cautious and respectful documentary -- or perhaps between defeat and vulnerability or between nudity and nakedness.

For the writer, whether of fiction or non-fiction, confession represents a kind of abandonment of agency in determining how the reader will respond to you*, a way of throwing yourself on the mercy of the court or declaring that you do not care what the court decides. How gently you throw yourself and the degree of hubris revealed by that throwing may dictate your reception, but in every case, confession is a request to be judged, whether or not you plan to respect that judgment. In contrast, confidence is an attempt to establish sympathy, rapport, understanding, and trust with another. It is a way to open yourself to another in the hope that they will judge you kindly, with sympathy, from the perspective of another flawed but worthy person. Confession implies the relationship will end as soon as the trial that motivated your confession ends; confidence implies that the relationship will not only endure, but that it will become more profound. There is some overlap in that both words involve judgment, but the nuances are important: they represent entirely different emotional contexts, and that makes all the difference in terms of how readers will respond to the writing.

* With the footnote, of course, that as writers, we have far less control than we might wish over how our words will be received and interpreted. We can lead our audience in a certain direction, but not all will follow us.

In the second article, Failure to Heal, Philip Alcabes discusses one of the key failures of modern medicine: the mechanistic notion that it is sufficient for a doctor to fix the broken machine, something the profession has become very good at doing. Left implicit is a wisdom that should be made explicit, because many of the doctors I've dealt with over the years clearly hadn't learned it: A doctor's role is not to stop someone from dying, as that is impossible; everyone will die someday, whether in a day or a century, the best medicine or medical practice notwithstanding. Rather, the doctor's goal is to help the patient to live.

From a purely mechanistic perspective, "not dying" is the same thing as "living". But from a more nuanced perspective, they're clearly not the same thing: one can live for decades in a coma or suffering from chronic pain and an inability to accomplish even the most basic things that give life meaning, or one can live only a few more days, surrounded by one's loved ones, savoring the moments, in full possession of one's ability to appreciate the nuances of a shaft of light through a dusty window, the savour of a great cup of tea, and the warmth of someone's hand in yours. The former is not living in the sense that anyone would want to live if given a choice; the latter is a way of living that should not be reserved for one's last few days on Earth, but rather something sought after in every moment of your life.

Grasping for nuance is not important because it shows our writerly grasp of the ability to flip pages in a dictionary. It's important because it helps us to remember the subtle but crucial things we may overlook in our daily lives. And if we're writers, and our goal is to share that appreciation with others, we need to look for, embrace, appreciate, and share our grasp of nuance.