Longer Road Can Be Worth The Trip
Call me Ishmael.
If you are a member of that marginalized group, Literate-Americans, you might recognize that as the first line of Herman Melville’s masterpiece, “Moby Dick.” If you’re not, you probably think I’ve had a name change.
And if you slid through college reading Cliffs Notes, you may well have quit this column two lines ago, thinking that it’s already droned on too long.
Remember Cliffs Notes? For those who don’t, they’re slender paperback booklets summarizing the main plot points and thematic elements of great works of literature. You buy them if you’re too busy - or lazy - to read the book the prof assigned.
Villanova University students are going to find that a little more difficult from now on. The school, which is on the outskirts of Philadelphia, just banned Cliffs Notes from its campus bookstore.
I’ll grant that it’s not exactly a mortal sin to sometimes skim a Cliffs Notes. At best, Villanova’s ban is only a minor inconvenience; stores off campus still carry the books.
But I like the message the school is sending here. Not just the read-the-book message, but also the one between the lines that says “take the long way around.”
Our whole lives have become shortcuts. We whisk through byte-sized days and microwaved nights as life rushes by in a blur, a subway train receding into some dark tunnel.
I blame Clarence Birdseye. He’s the man who pioneered the process of freezing vegetables, making an anachronism of slow hours on the porch snapping peas or shucking corn. Things have gone much faster since then.
I remember when I was very young how Mama turned up her nose at the very idea of dinner that came from a box. Before I got much older, she was buying frozen veggies with the best of them.
Who can blame her? She wanted what we all want. More time. Life grows steadily more complex, our options constantly more confusing, but God, shortsighted deity that he is, still gives us the same 24-hour days he gave Moses.
So we search for ways to squeeze out more minutes. We live at a pace of faster! and more! and end up skimming the surface of most things like beetles whizzing across pond water. Never a pause, never a slowdown, never a dull moment.
Shortcuts.
And from that, superficiality. Or, as Bruce Springsteen once sang, we’ve got “57 channels and nothin’ on.”
Because shortcuts become an end unto themselves. Time saved from doing one thing faster gets spent doing another thing faster. And somehow, there’s still never enough time to make a friend, romance a spouse, appreciate a child’s watercolor masterwork, watch the clouds.
Never enough time to simply reflect. So in place of thoughtful discussion, we now have bumper sticker debates. You try to explore a knotty conundrum with someone, only to realize that the other person is simply regurgitating the position paper of some partisan group. They recite NRA Cliffs Notes but are unable to extrapolate, consider alternatives or reach the dangerous ground on the other side of fixed position.
Who thinks anymore? Who has the time?
Which raises the question: Whatever are we saving all this time for if not to learn and grow? If not to feed head and heart more friendships, more loving, more watercolors, more clouds. If not to read “Moby Dick.”
Something I never did, by the way. As Ahab hunted the great white whale, I hunt the time to read Melville’s tale. I sat down with the book a few years back and made good headway before being beaten back by the density of the narrative and the crush of other things to do.
I didn’t have the time the book required; I’ve always nursed a vague regret about that. I mean, if I couldn’t get through “Moby Dick,” I guess “War And Peace” is out of the question.
Funny, isn’t it? No matter how much time you save, there’s never enough. But we rush around as if the rushing might change that, might squeeze a 25th hour into the day.
It’s a futile chase. For some things, for the things that ennoble and define us and make us fully human, there are no shortcuts. You have to take the long way around.
xxxx