The need for speed
We want to know it all, but please, keep it brief
Maybe it has to do with the time famine that afflicts us all. Maybe it has to do with our notoriously shortened attention spans in the Internet age. Or maybe we've all just decided to push back against ''supersize" this and ''grande" that, and to finally give props to doddering old Polonius, who told us in ''Hamlet" that brevity is the soul of wit.
Whatever the reason, brief takes on big subjects are suddenly all the rage. Even when it comes to weighty topics such as the origins of the universe or the nature of consciousness, we are evidently starting to conclude that less is more, that shorter is better, that Lilliputian beats Brobdingnagian any day of the week. Even before
Last month, physicist Stephen Hawking published ''A Briefer History of Time," a condensed version of his best-selling ''A Brief History of Time." If such cosmic matters can be made first brief and then briefer, what's next? ''A Tale of One City"? ''Sketchy Memories of Things Past"? ''A Snapshot of the Artist as a Young Man"?
In a development that means you could, theoretically, absorb the wisdom of the Scriptures while stalled in traffic on the Southeast Expressway, a British publisher recently released ''The 100-Minute Bible," which boils down the Bible into a 64-page paperback by picking out what the publisher calls ''the principle [sic] stories of the life and ministry of its central character, Jesus Christ." This mini-tome is not to be confused with ''The HCSB Light Speed Bible," published last month, which promises to, ''in an exhilarating sweep of 24 hours, expose your mind and heart to every word and teaching of the Old and New Testaments."
The average sound bite allotted to presidential candidates in network news coverage had shrunk to less than eight seconds in 2004, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, based in Washington, D.C. On the entertainment side, the TV miniseries -- once a stalwart of the medium -- is now all but extinct, apparently not being mini enough for these fast-paced times.
The Reduced Shakespeare Company, which bills itself as ''comedy for the quick of mind and short of time"' and rose to renown by performing abridged versions of all 37 of Shakespeare's plays in 97 minutes, last month launched its newest foray into theatrical truncation: ''Completely Hollywood," which offers sped-up versions of such notoriously bloated films as ''Titanic." The show's motto: ''Lights! Camera! Reduction!"
For the past few seasons, the regional cable sports network NESN has aired a midnight ''Sox in 2," a two-hour, condensed version of the Red Sox game broadcast earlier that day.
Even the quest for fitness and inner peace is operating on a tighter schedule. Yoga and spinning classes that once lasted a leisurely hour have been cut to 30 minutes -- and clients are flocking to them. Meanwhile, numerous health club chains have introduced ''express" programs that promise clients they can get in shape with mini-workouts of a half-hour or less.
Oxford University Press is publishing a line of books on the seven deadly sins that do not exceed 152 pages, not even for lust. Osprey Publishing is tightening the circle still further with a line of books on such momentous events as D-day -- each running fewer than 100 pages. Readers are so enamored of brevity that if you type in the words ''Short history" on Amazon.com, 10,450 titles surface, ranging from ''A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson to ''A Short History of Myth" by Karen Armstrong to ''A Short History of Financial Euphoria" by John Kenneth Galbraith.
All in all, it's as if the entire culture has adopted the old military motto: KISS, for Keep It Short and Simple (or, in one rough-edged variation: Keep It Simple, Stupid). So what's going on here?
''The larger cultural issue is what we began to see 25 years ago with USA Today: an acknowledgment that people are time-stressed," says Leonard Steinhorn, a communications professor at American University in Washington, D.C. ''Americans are working longer hours than anyone in the world, longer than the Japanese, longer than the Germans. There's little support in our society for child care; we're on the road a lot driving; we're constantly told we have to make all of our choices in life, that we have to think about what healthcare plan we're going to do. Our life is more stressed and full of decisions, and yet people want information, they want knowledge."
Publishing executives such as Elda Rotor are keenly aware of that. Rotor, a senior editor in the trade division at Oxford University Press, says that while her company still publishes plenty of big books, it is increasingly looking for ways to condense massive topics into slender volumes. So, in addition to the seven deadly sins line that she originated, Oxford University Press publishes a ''Very Short Introduction" series on subjects including ethics and literary theory. At the moment, Rotor is commissioning a ''Lives and Legacies" series in which authors will be asked to capture the fullness of giants such as Walt Whitman and Mark Twain in fewer than 150 pages.
''I don't think this trend is going to end anytime soon," Rotor says. ''People have a very short amount of time, and they really like to have these kinds of books and read them at a succinct length. There's a lot competing for your attention every day: e-mail, text messages." The new trend toward shorter books, she says, ''reflects the speed at which we live, but still our hunger for knowledge, our hunger for information."
But some worry about what is lost in the rush to compress and contract so much learning and human experience. ''It's a setback for the process of acquiring knowledge," contends Brad Prager, who teaches in the Department of German and Russian studies at the University of Missouri. ''It seems that people want to just check off on their list that they know about set things. The pleasure should be in the process of acquiring knowledge. It's a shame when a lifetime of studying physics gets boiled down . . . just so someone can have a handy one-liner at a cocktail party."
There are exceptions, of course. The introduction of Amazon Pages may change this, but until now fiction has been one corner of the culture that resisted this trend. Bulky novels such as Jonathan Franzen's ''The Corrections" and Michael Chabon's ''The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" have garnered large audiences, Paul Anderson's new ''Hunger's Brides" weighs in at more than 1,300 pages, and William T. Vollmann's 800-page novel ''Europe Central" won the National Book Award this week. But in the realm of nonfiction, Prager has been struck by how quickly books are moving, length-wise, ''more and more close to pamphlets." Even solid scholarship, such as ''The Holocaust: The Third Reich and the Jews," by David Engel, which Prager uses in one of his courses, is fewer than 90 pages in its hardcover edition. ''Students often want to just know what happened," he says. ''But there's no historical event that isn't so complex that there aren't multiple readings of it or multiple ways of interpreting it."
That sort of complexity, and a depth of cultural knowledge, Prager fears, will be a casualty of the trend toward compression. He dryly notes that the shorter-is-better principle is selectively applied: ''People can spend six hours an evening in front of a television, and these are people who mysteriously don't have time to make their way through a Dostoevski novel."
But Steinhorn sees a silver lining in the overall move toward contraction. ''It could be a corrective to long-windedness," he says. ''You don't have to go on forever to be able to communicate important, fascinating, and complex ideas. You see so many books that were originally articles in The New Yorker that aren't any better than they were as articles."
Besides, he adds, ''The greatest thing written in American English was the Gettysburg Address" -- and that clocked in at a tidy 272 words. Proving, perhaps, that brevity is the soul of statecraft, and that Lincoln once again was ahead of his time.
Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com. 