The Man Who Sold the World

"Who are you," asked Joseph to the man in the shabby coat. In an ancient, fluctuating timber, the man replied, "I sold the world for a few dollars and a hot bowl of soup." -From the edited works of Douglas E. Preeney

How often do you really read? Not the column on your favorite website, or the one-off blog posting by your cubicle mate, but rather a hefty tome, filled with intricate plots and symbolic dissections of the world around you? Was it a week, a month, or since college?

As we become more immediate content oriented, the media that surround us seems to become more bite-sized, less chewy, lacking the chewy fiber of description and development. Even the novels that release with fanfare seem to have become power packed lines collected into paragraph structures:

***

"Who's there," asked the cynical book critic, his palms paused in mid-critique, "if you know what's good for you, you'll let the cat out of that bag and unloosen your tongue."

"I'm death, and I'm here for you." That was all that the man in black uttered as darkness rushed in, palpable and smooth.

***

What's going to happen as the years progress, as we move from the ages of the narrative epic to the short story to the blog-turned-book phenomenon? Is the next evolutionary step "the collected lines from the celebrated columnist," or worse still, an anthology of the grimacing sentences of Simon Cowell?

Sure, this sounds like the moaning of a ludite, so you can write it off as such. However, there is a serious brain drain occurring in our world. Take, for instance, the celebrated writing of the young novelists. Johnaton Saffron Froer writes nuggets of pearly wisdom, yet he uses the annoying Murakami system of alternating chapters with alternating story lines. Unless you've got the whole multitaking system entrenched in your mind, then you'll be lost-er than Matthew Fox. How about Gary Shteyngart, author of "Absurdistan," whose name alone prevented me from reading the book. Shteyngart...if I had an attention span longer than a second, I might bother to learn to pronounce it. On Demand, Sirius, and text messaging have all conspired to make us slow-haters.

Thus, the brunt of this tirade. I sat down tonight, with aching back, to read Dicken's "Hard Times," a novel that I enjoyed in college. Couldn't do it. The first sentence that wasn't direct exposition, a langorious description of the surrounding, led me to wonder about people and sleep, with a healthy dose of perviness. Then, the television beckoned.

I guess what I'm saying is that we've, or maybe just I've, forgotten what its like to take some time to trudge through a book, that delicious tangle of words, to see what's all around. Just like walking with my buddy Vinnie Vici, we're just speeding through the streets, not bothering to notice the curios and cracks that line the sidewalk of the bustling city. I'm ready for another fix of modernity, leave that old fashioned thinking behind.

***

"All this I leave to you," the father coughed, "and yet you don't see the splendors beyond your own two feet." The boy, utterly bored, turned from his dying father, and stared at the blister slowly form on his rubbed, raw hand.