The Apologist’s Anathema Against Twitter & Other Quick Takes: 7QT II Seriatim

Twitter 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.

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