At the end of Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (a terrific thriller), serial killer Hannibal Lector writes inspector Clarice Starling a letter to let her know he won’t come after her if she won’t come after him. “I have no plans to call on you, Clarice, the world being more interesting with you in it. Be sure to extend me the same courtesy.”
In the (perfect) movie adaptation, Hannibal calls Clarice on the phone, and he says it just a little differently: “The world’s more interesting with you in it.”
I think about this line all the time in our contemporary era. The world is so big and full of people and we’re receiving updates about it all constantly. Sometimes it’s a relief when people — particularly celebrities or artists — mess up and do something awful and we feel we can now just write them off completely. We can unfollow. We can cancel our subscriptions to them, so to speak. “Everyone is Canceled,” was the title of a recent NYTimes piece about the phenomenon, starting with the lede, “Almost everyone worth knowing has been canceled by someone.”
I cancel as much as anyone, I suppose, but I often find myself thinking of that Hannibal Lector line, with a little change to the pronoun. “The world’s more interesting with him in it.” (I used to apply it to Kanye, but never to the president.) Sometimes I modify it for use on music, movies, books, etc.: “This book wasn’t for me, but the world’s more interesting with this book in it.”
The line works in many contexts. You could, for example, flip it around and aim it at yourself: Don’t disappear on us. Don’t cancel your own subscription. Stick around. Keep going. The world is more interesting with you in it.