It is the enthymeme tactics and strategies of the unsaid that reverberate. One wonders why such and such a passage appears. Take for example the personal reminiscence of the "unostentatiosly silent" friend and roomer who it is discoved some ten years later to have worked in a supersecret intelligence office. The anecdote seems gratutious. It is until you think about history, gender roles and community support, ideas that weave in and around the examples.

As a reader you are invited to pause and ponder.

One of my favourite moments is the suggestion that the elimination of one-way streets in a maze can improve the traffic flow. "These impediments were contrived to keep vehicles out of one another's way and thus carry out the theme of a speedy trip." There is no mention of the width of the streets. And one begins to understand the relations between on-street parking practices and mazes of one-way streets. And before digressing into consideration of funds generated from city permits and the more fundamental question of city right to raise revenue, one understands that one-way streets may have less to do with traffic calming and more with car ownership patterns. Who needs a maze of one-way streets where on street parking is not required or desired? Tug and pull.

As a reader you are invited to ponder, pause and ponder some more.

Intellectual effort, creative work, being at play in a community, these are without saying the ways that sustain. Not mere tolerance but active curiousity. Not as difficult as it seems. Cuz the feedback loops are so very good.

The key to postagarian wealth is the complicated task of nuturing economic diversity, opportunity, and peace without resort to oppression.

Many pages before this elegant enumeration, I found myself reaching for my commonplace book to record a great and beautiful sentence. She is describing what lies at "the core of this intellectual phenomenon now shaping much (but not all) of Western culture"

Greed becomes culturally admired as competence, and false or unrealistic promises as cleverness.

There is a quiet marginal square bracket in my copy to indicate to future readers that somebody stopped here and marked the passage, a single sentence, with a pencil. And this is how my copy circulates. It celebrates the truly clever and the competent. No matter where they may be and how loud or soft their voices, it is they that provide the cohorts of culture bearers, the teacher-learners.

When human beings are nurtured, efficiency and economies of scale don't apply. Helping individuals become acceptable and fulfilled members of a culture takes generous individual attention to each one, usually from numerous people. Many autobiographies and memoirs attest gratefully to just such life-saving and morale-boosting attention.

Song after song. Heart after heart.

And you want to say when she compares Roman and American culture, the latter reveling in the richness of its indigenous arts, that we don't know if the empire sustained equivalents of "gospel music and blues; songs of labor unions, cowboys, and chain gangs; hits from musicals and films; country music, jazz, ballads, sea chanteys, rock and roll, and rap; patriotic, war, antiwar, and seasonal songs, advertising ditties; nursery rhymes; school, campfire, drinking, homesick, and love songs; lullabies; revival hymns; plus disrespectful parodies of the lot." So little is extant. That's the point.