My question is this: If the universe is expanding, then how come the world is getting smaller? Time has speeded up and we hustle along in the fast lane, frenetically multi-tasking. But that accelerated time gobbles up space. Life passes in a blur, we make life-altering decisions, as Malcolm Gladwell argues in his recent book on instinctive thinking, in a blink. Having been aerodynamicized, we travel light. Although McDonald's offers to supersize its bloated customers, most of us prefer to be microsized.
To me, the most wistful evidence of shrinkage is the way the ego has lost its capital letter: Teenagers, accustomed to typing phone messages with their thumbs, now often write the personal pronoun as "i," not "I." We disemvowel language in terse txt msgs to our m8s, using punctuation marks and parentheses to semaphore our moods. We live in a culture suicidally intent on abbreviation.
Once upon a time, our planet looked immense. When Adam and Eve leave Eden in Paradise Lost, they confront a world that is "all before them." Its scope is panoramic, because it consists of things that have not yet happened. A few brief centuries later, the world is all behind us. Every possible experience has passed through our system and we can only look forward to repetition or, at best, to a bizarre recombination, like the dyspeptic garbling of fusion cuisine or the randomly shuffled tracks on an MP3 player.
We think of this weariness as postmodern, but it has infected humanity for more than a century. In Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady, a breezily confident western rancher offers the remorseful heroine a happy ending, and tells her: "The world's very large." She refuses his offer of the open range and replies: "The world's very small," and chooses to go on living inside her solitary head.
Nietzsche saw this subjective geography as a terminal symptom for our species: "The Earth has become small, and on it hops the Last Man, who makes everything small. His race is as inextinguishable as the flea."
Well, we are all last men now, and the gadgetry which so obsesses us -- laptops to which we confide our sexual secrets whenever we peep into contraband sites, digital cameras that compress our emotional archives into a stamp album of snaps, Palm Pilots that fit into an open hand and contain the network of contacts and appointments that our livelihoods depend on -- is a flea circus of tricksy, treacherous electronic microbes.
These shiny midgets have made our world so small that it may soon vanish altogether. Technology is an extension of magic, which calls on occult forces -- spirits in the old days, circuits and microchips today -- and begs them to obliterate reality.
In The Tempest, Prospero makes "the great globe itself" dissolve by waving his wand. Cybernetics has industrialized such conjuring feats and the reassuringly solid fabric of the past is disappearing into what Prospero calls "air, thin air," or into some virtual limbo where it waits to be downloaded.
Who needs books, now that Microsoft has concluded a deal with the British Library to digitize 25 million pages of its holdings? Who needs shelves of compact discs, now that 15,000 musical tracks can be piped through cables?
"It's impossibly tiny," boasted an Apple mogul when unveiling the iPod nano recently. Give the geeks a decade or so and they will have junked the hardware and started to sell us implants: an MP3 that fits in the ear like a hearing aid, a camera inserted into the cornea, a MacMini -- Apple's new, scaled-down, white computer -- to be kept where our messily organic ancestors had a cerebral cortex.
Opportunities
This brave new world abounds in business opportunities and the entrepreneurs of miniaturization are hard at work. Publishers compete to offer less, not more, to readers. First came Short Books, which once had a strand called "Short Lives" -- boppy obituaries for interesting historical characters.
Adam Nicolson, a contributor to the series, calls the books "reduced sauces;" gastronomically, I'd rather liken them to Chicken McNuggets. As with fast-food, the product relies on a rapid metabolism and a fluent colon.
A promotional article describing the first batch argued that "each book can be read in under an hour and then discarded." Remember when books, like spouses, promised to be loyal, lifetime companions?
The idea was promptly mimicked by Little Books. This company's slogan is "It's the Little Things in Life that Matter," so its output is correspondingly trivial: Pea-brained authors write chats with cats and dialogues with dogs (yes, in two, separate, teensy-weensy volumes).
Books that have already been written need to be saved from their ponderous bulk. First to be scissored into submission is the book that used to be known as the Good Book, because it contains and comprehends all other books.
I own an embossed and illustrated Victorian Bible that weighs two stone; it is heavy because it is serious, solemn, a compendium of wisdom. What is called for today is a Bible that is lighter (or liter).
A retired priest in Canterbury, England, has slimmed down my oppressive tome to 57 pages, which those in a hurry to be born again can cram into their heads in 100 minutes.
"The original text," as the editor admitted, "is very often highly poetic and allusive." Such obsolete graces have been replaced by bullet points that briskly enumerate "further resurrection appearances" by the arisen Christ.
By contrast with this slack-mindedness, the SMSBible currently circulating in Australia is almost forgivable. The gimmick is astute: 31,713 verses have been translated into the guttural idiom of the text message, so you can use your mobile phone to uplift homilies and pass them on to your friends.
The telephone, which performs miracles by beaming voices and words through space, is a natural implement for the evangelist. You might even work your way through both Old and New Testaments, but since each verse costs about US$0.19 to transmit, it's still much cheaper to do the antediluvian thing and buy a copy of the Bible.
Here as always, simplification and abbreviation are derisive, a means of taking revenge on texts that seem intimidating because they expect you to make strenuous mental efforts (not to mention the moral exercises the Bible prescribes for its readers). In the SMSBible, the opening verse of the Gospel of St John might have been enunciated by a rapper speaking in tongues: "In da Bginnin waz da 1 who is called da Word. Da Word was wit God & waz truly God."
Last year, when Microsoft gutted The Iliad, reducing it to 32 SMS-ready gobbets, with sad and smiley faces attached like infantile versions of the tragic and comic masks worn in the Greek theatre, it pretended that the aim was to "encourage people to read the full book." But by calling its version Trim Troy, Microsoft implied that everything it had deducted -- the poetry, the heroism, the moral complexity -- was merely fat, fit for the butcher's knife. In fact, this was the abbreviation of an abbreviation, marketed to help teenagers sort out the plot of Wolfgang Petersen's Troy, in which the skirted Achilles of Brad Pitt has a barny, brains Hector [Eric Bana], then gets it in the heel.
Contemptuous
More candidly contemptuous, American lawyer David Bader desecrates The Odyssey in One Hundred Great Books in Haiku, an anthology of glib annihilation which crushes venerable texts to make them fit the strict, taut Japanese form. Only three lines and 17 syllables are permitted, so Homer's narrative, which is about those detours and digressions that are the stuff of life and the sustenance of literature, becomes a weather bulletin, calculated to make travelers groan in dismay: "Aegean forecast/ storms, chance of one-eyed giants/ delays expected."
Bader's project, as he brags, is to denounce the mass production of books made possible by Gutenberg's printing press, which he blames for "eyestrain, paper cuts, deforestation" and associated evils. The haiku's advantage is that it can be uttered in a single breath.
Hyperventilating our way through an average day, we have only that solitary gasp to spare.
Bader jokes that the haiku was probably "developed by Zen monks suffering from attention-deficit disorder." Literary language is meditative, a prolonged pondering of experiences that in life might pass unnoticed. The plots of Shakespeare's plays are banal enough; the purpose is to prompt the linguistic inventiveness of the characters or justify their self-analytical soliloquies. The BBC, serving a post-literate society, has expunged all of Shakespeare's words from the plays in its current series ShakespeaRE-Told.
"Is Puck short for puck-up?" asks Oberon in the slangy new A Midsummer Night's Dream. No, his name is not short for anything; it comes from an ancient and mysterious word for sprite and, once we have it in our vocabularies, we can identify people who are puckish. Reducing it to an expletive degrades the word, erases the idea, impoverishes language and makes us ever so slightly more stupid than we were before.
Writers worship what Arundhati Roy calls "the god of small things," but they take care, like Roy in her prize-winning novel, to show how "little events" can be "imbued with new meaning," given value by the attention we pay to minutiae.
Skidding perusal
Reading should be immersive; today, instead of swimming, we skim or surf. The metaphor that describes our skidding perusal of the Internet says everything about the mental process involved, since survival depends on keeping your head and even your feet above the water, riding the ocean of information without being overwhelmed.
In Movies in Fifteen Minutes, American humorist Cleolinda Jones applies the same buoyantly superficial approach to films that demand too much of us. Her revved-up plotlines caper through over-extended blockbusters, scaling them down "for people who can't be bothered." The results, I concede, are hilarious.
Fast-forwarding Titanic, Jones turns the trapped passengers into a traumatized viewers in a cinema, who panic when they realize that they're going to have to sit still for another hour, with no interval to relieve their brimming bladders. If they relax their sphincters, will the cinema be flooded? Jones can't forgive Cameron's theft of time -- he has stolen three hours from us without permitting a dash to the bathroom.
The anxiety is illusory, which is what makes it so absurd. We abbreviate because we think we are short of time; in fact, we are leisured creatures burdened or boring by an excess of it, and we rely on our gadgets to use time up.
Technology changes the way we live and who we are. Once the earplugs are in place, the iPod alters consciousness. The Shuffle's mission statement was "Life Is Random," which announced its plan to make scrambled eggs of the brain.
We behave as if the control buttons on our appliances had power over existence itself. Brevity appeals because it gives us the sensation that we are fast-forwarding through time. Remembering is delegated to the hard drive; if something unpleasant happens, we press delete.
I wonder if the machines are playing a sinister joke on us. Having eaten up the present, they are also busily ingesting our entire cultural past, which, when digitalized, will probably, like the iPod nano, be smaller than a credit card and only 6.9mm thick. Isn't abbreviation a prelude to obliteration? From now on, I intend to be in less of a hurry. Life is short. All the more reason for everything else, art especially, to be long.
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