Life & Wisdom Quote by Marianne Moore

Trust, for Marianne Moore, is not a halo you earn; it is an atmosphere you breathe in - or fail to. By borrowing the language of infection, she steals the moral glamour from trust and recasts it as something startlingly physical and transmissible. The move is sly: if sickness spreads without anyone consenting, then maybe trust does too, not because people are virtuous but because humans are porous. We catch cues. We mirror risk. We relax when others relax.

Moore’s phrasing also flips a cultural reflex. Modern life trains us to treat distrust as the “realistic” posture and trust as a naive leap. She suggests the opposite kind of pragmatism: trust can be engineered socially the way outbreaks are managed. If suspicion can become a self-fulfilling prophecy - everyone hoards, lies, armors up, and the world obliges - then trust can also be a feedback loop, sparked by small, visible acts that lower the perceived cost of cooperation.

The subtext is quietly political. Moore lived through industrial modernity, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War: eras where fear traveled faster than facts. Against that background, “contagion” reads like a diagnosis of mass psychology, but also a strategy. You can’t lecture a society into faith. You seed it. One credible gesture, one institution behaving as promised, one person taking the first unreciprocated risk - and the social temperature changes.