The apologist’s anathema against Twitter, and other quick takes: 7QT II, seriatim.

wit­ter has its uses, I guess. And note that by “I guess” I mean some­thing along the lines of: A wild and blind shot into an emp­ty field hop­ing that maybe a deer will show up at the last minute to be felled.  I have found, in my ten months or so on Twit­ter, that I have used it main­ly for shar­ing arti­cles (includ­ing my own) or quo­ta­tions with a sting in the pith.  But who ever learned any­thing from those bane­ful descrip­tions of movies in the TV sec­tion, of one sen­tence or a frag­ment? The descrip­tion of “For­rest Gump” might be “A retard­ed man from the fifties til today.” The descrip­tion of “Top Hat” might read “Fred Astaire and Gin­ger Rogers dance.” Use­less.  I look up “Hatari” and find it’s John Wayne on safari.  That’s good for a rhyme. Why is it bet­ter on Twit­ter?

“The medi­um is the mes­sage,” the media crit­ic Mar­shall McLuhan said.  The mes­sage that comes across on Twit­ter is that you can do thought in 150 char­ac­ters. But you can’t. You can trade barbs; you can prac­tice one-lin­ers; you can try to be quick-wit­ted with the riposte.  But at bot­tom, Twit­ter feeds our hunger to think in sound bites, and sound bites feed our hunger not to have to think at all. That’s why we’re under the boot of politi­cians and adver­tis­ers all the time.  Some­times you need a long paragraph—or a long sen­tence; some­times you need fifty pages to devel­op an idea. Or five hun­dred.  Most of my blog arti­cles require 1500 words before I’ve begun.  Some­times you can get a nice G.K. Chester­ton quo­ta­tion into 150 char­ac­ters, but you’ve missed all the context—you’ve missed the twen­ty-five pages that led him to that 150-let­ter crescen­do. The Ode to Joy means more when you hear it in the con­text of the entire Ninth Sym­pho­ny than when you hear it alone.  In writ­ing, in rhetoric, and in apolo­get­ics we need to recov­er the long haul; and in our lives, for the sake of our minds, we need to recov­er the abil­i­ty to find the qui­et space and put the rest aside and engage the depths of an idea for as deep as it goes.  Oth­er­wise we shall find our­selves in Brave New World, think­ing and gov­ern­ing our­selves by slo­gans.

II.

I always want­ed to write an essay defend­ing the long nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry nov­el, but I always found that I was too busy read­ing the long nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry nov­el to actu­al­ly write it.

III.

“Quote” is a verb; “quo­ta­tion” is a noun. It is not, “I like that quote”; it is, “I like that quo­ta­tion.” Use “quote” when you want to say some­thing like, “He quot­ed Pope Fran­cis out of con­text.” (And you can say that all day long.) Use “quo­ta­tion” when you want to say some­thing like, “That quo­ta­tion was tak­en out of con­text.” I’m pret­ty cer­tain that was how Orwell’s dystopia began: by cut­ting back on let­ters and syl­la­bles in order to sim­pli­fy thought.

IV.

One of the com­mon argu­ments a Catholic apol­o­gist will make against Protes­tantism is its use of pri­vate judg­ment alone to guide the inter­pre­ta­tion of Sacred Scrip­ture. Often, a Protes­tant apol­o­gist will counter this way: Unless the Mag­is­teri­um has giv­en an infal­li­ble inter­pre­ta­tion of every last verse of Scrip­ture, all Catholics have is pri­vate judg­ment too. This ques­tion came up for me ear­li­er this week on—ahem—Twit­ter. You can’t answer that in 150 char­ac­ters, but here’s a para­graph; here’s a start:

The point of infal­li­bil­i­ty is not to answer every ques­tion that can be asked, nor give an infal­li­ble read­ing of every verse that is in Scrip­ture. Instead, the point of infal­li­bil­i­ty is to main­tain the uni­ty of the faith. It is to define what the faith is. So in deal­ing with a par­tic­u­lar verse of Scrip­ture, a Catholic has lat­i­tude as long as he remains faith­ful to the deposit of the faith, and as long as he does not con­tra­dict some­thing Scrip­ture says else­where. But when the Protes­tant exer­cis­es his pri­vate judg­ment, he has no such bound­aries. He must remain con­sis­tent only with him­self. If his read­ing of Scrip­ture is at odds with his sec­t’s, he can join anoth­er one and still be a good Protes­tant. He can start his own and still be a good Protes­tant. If a Catholic does that, he’ll no longer be a Catholic; he’ll be a Protes­tant instead. That’s the dif­fer­ence: The Catholic has lat­i­tude; the Protes­tant has anar­chy. The Catholic dri­ves with­in the lanes. The Protes­tant is on a road with­out lanes, get­ting into wrecks. 

V.

This is a pic­ture that gives my inner writer a great deal of com­fort. Can you make out the words at the top? “Stave I. Mar­ley’s Ghost.” This is Dick­en­s’s orig­i­nal man­u­script of A Christ­mas Car­ol, and the rea­son it gives me com­fort is all the cor­rec­tions. The great­est writer who ever lived was Shake­speare; I would argue that a close—a very close—second was Charles Dick­ens. And yet not even Dick­ens could get it right the first time. He revised, and revised, and revised again; thus I have com­fort when I look at a blog arti­cle I’ve writ­ten and say, “No, this will nev­er do. This must be done again.” And so I’ll revise it three, four, five, six thou­sand times before I hit “pub­lish.” It’s not about get­ting it out; it’s about get­ting it right. I feel less sor­ry for Dick­ens, who had to strug­gle to get the words right, than I feel sor­ry for the type­set­ter, who had to get Dick­en­s’s books into print from a man­u­script that looked like that.

VI.

A time there used to be when, to respond to one writer’s ideas, a writer of a con­trary point of view would take months to pub­lish an essay, or years to pub­lish a book. And if a reply was to be had from the orig­i­nal side, that might take months or years again. There was a val­ue in that. Not the least of the val­ues was that it gave peo­ple time to ful­ly absorb the ideas they were respond­ing to—both the mer­its and demer­its; it gave peo­ple time to give a con­sid­ered reply, rather than an urgent reply that must be giv­en lest you appear to be stu­pid and stumped or, still worse, lest you end up address­ing a sub­ject that was “so thir­ty sec­onds ago.” But I don’t look at the New Tes­ta­ment and say, “That’s so 1st cen­tu­ry A.D.” I don’t look at Shake­speare and say, “That’s so Eliz­a­bethan.” If it’s not worth talk­ing about again in five weeks, it’s prob­a­bly not worth talk­ing about today, unless it’s some­thing like “What do you want for din­ner?” (Do I sound like some­one who’s impa­tient with small talk?) But the prob­lem with our time-sav­ing devices—part of the problem—is that they have also increased the speed of thought and the speed of time; and that is to our loss. The British writer Mar­tin Amis, in an inter­view some­where I can­not now find, not­ed that the speed of time has increased, and that in order for the nov­el to remain rel­e­vant it must speed itself up too.

Mar­tin Amis was one of my key proofs in defense of the nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry nov­el.

VII.

The Cana­di­an author Carl Hon­ore wrote an entire book called In Praise of Slow­ness. It has been sit­ting on my night­stand, part of a large stack of books, for some time. I have been slow in get­ting to it. For some rea­son, I sense that there is no rush.

There is beau­ty in slow­ing down time so that you can live in its depth and not skim its sur­face. There’s your 150-char­ac­ter, or less, sound bite.

Read more of this week’s quick takes at Con­ver­sion Diary.