Sun-Shiny

A while ago I walked into a used book store and walked out with The Song of Hiawatha. It is a classic, and I thought I ought to read it. It looked pretty interesting. But what I didn’t realize until I just lately picked it up again was that it is the selected passage form of the poem. My mom has begun reading The Red Badge of Courage to my younger brothers at bedtime, and realized that the book is actually abridged. Last week at my local public library old Reader’s Digest books went on sale—twenty-five cents each. In my English class last year we read the abridged A Tale of Two Cities. Why is so much abridged?!

It’s craziness! Soon the only novels we will be exposed to will be condensed half-pages. Biographies will be simple statements of where the person was born and died. History will become a list of wars and people will forget what war means. Harry Potter will become simply the name of some British dude; there is so much more!

I am exaggerating (a bit), but in all honesty, some things should not be shrunk. I am not sure I would want to be the one to decide what stays and what goes, but we should be aware that information is being taken out and decide whether it should be. (Of course that means we would have to read though everything unabridged to decide.) My teacher told us that most of what was abridged out of A Tale of Two Cities was French history. But maybe what was taken out when it was abridged is necessary now for us to fully comprehend because we live in a different time. It is not really practical to carry around a two-foot thick history book, and yet history has happened, and we would be the smaller for not knowing what our history is.

Perhaps one reason for the shrinking properties of our general information is that, although the hours in the day have not gotten any shorter or any fewer, there is less and less time floating around in western culture. If children are doing second-grade math at age five, it is not extraordinarily remarkable. Children are expected to do one or more sports during the week. We are losing time—because we are overfilling what we have. Thus diluted material has become a blessing; we need spend only minutes instead of hours on material. For my English class to spend one term on A Tale of Two Cities instead of a semester was wonderful--it meant that we were exposed to more literature.

In the twenty-first century we have so much pressing on us for attention. The Apple computer company has now come out with an iPod that can play movies and TV shows. The internet has I-don’t-know-how-much information. My point is that we are being assailed on every level. Our attention is claimed in so many places that sometimes an abridgment is the only form in which we are willing to digest information that is not vital to what we are doing now. We are aware of so much of the world, so many things happening in every place. We decide what we want to know, and often a reduced version is enough for our piece of mind, whether it be literature, current events, science, history, or anything else.

Knowing everything about everything, reading everything, is not truly necessary or advised. Older books, such as J.R.R. Tolkein’s, were written to enable readers to be able to skip the long descriptive passages if they so desired, and still have the story material. Sir Walter Scott wrote Ivanho with both long descriptive passages and separate action-filled passages to please both his male and female readers. Books like A Tale of Two Cities were written with the thought in mind that readers would read what interested them and leave the rest. The authors wrote their books knowing that if it's not there, I can't read it; if it's there, I can choose not to read it. Authors did not abridge their books themselves--they expected their readers to do that. Authors now-a-days want to hold their readers' interest and so make their books either descriptive or action filled.

There are many good reasons to be brief. But on the other hand to be unaware of crucial information is to be unable to know what you are missing, and whether you should mind. If you did not read the story, how will you be able to decide if the conclusion wrapped up all the loose ends in the story? Consider the extended versions of the Lord of the Ring movies: if something is good, the American public wants alot more of it. Abridging is all well and good, but we should make sure that the entire work is always easily accessible so the reader will know what is being taken out and can abridge for themselves. And how will you understand the world and her people if you have only read the Reader’s Digest on everything.