Short Story Long

      A long time ago I developed the annoying habit of constantly saying inconversation: “to make a long story short”, when trying to describe somethingor relate an incident.  Sometimes I spoutthe full formula; others I just say “long story short”, then launch into an over-elaborate recitation.  

          (By  way of background, I've had occasion lately to tell the story about a formerboss of mine who tried to correct this approach by telling me: “Curtis, Iasked you what time it was; I didn't ask you how to make a watch.”) 

        This summer, when Jane and I began exchanging letters forthe first time I noticed that she had also adopted this usage,although more charmingly than I, when trying to record day-to-day summercamp history.  I assume this is anexample of what child development experts call “nurture.”  (For this I say, "sorry, Jane.")

 

        I was considering the matter a couple of weeks ago (before reading Jane’s first “long story short”, as it happened), while gorgeous Sundaymorning driving in cool winds after hard Hudson Valley rains, and it occurred to me that life was actually mostly “short story long.”

        That is to say, events really do unfold in foreshortened,curious, semi-coincidental short story-like sequences.  We predictably and unconsciously then assignvarious levels and degrees of precedence and irony to the elements (as we categorizethings to keep them in some sort of meaningful order), and after that theypersist our entire waking and sleeping lives, revisiting us as separate, discrete,unintegrated strands of memory.  Ergo,cognitive consonance, dissonance or utter chaos, depending on the individual.

    I greatly admire novelists, epic-length poets and composers,and visual artists who create large-scale paintings and sculpture programs filled withfigures and incident.  Theydemonstrate much that is great about human potential. (However, someone oncewrote about James Michener’s latest best-seller: “Don’t read it and don’tdrop it on your foot”, which I think is fair.)

       But poets writing shorter poems, short story masters, pop songcomposers, small-scale easel painters and recipe writers generally appeal to memore.


 

        There is power in compression and compression is anillusion.

        It all stretches out. I don’t know why.

Key:

1.  Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, 1869.
2.  Girard-Perregaux rose-gold wristwatch, 1945
3.  Ivan Turgenev, A Sportsman's Sketches, 1852.
4.  Theodore Gericault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818-19. 
5.  Richard Wagner, The Ring of the Nibelung, 1848-74.
6.  John Cage, 4' 33", 1952.
7.  Tom Clark, Stones, 1968.
8.  The Kinks, The Kink Kontroversy, 1965.
9.  Piet Mondrian, Composition With Red, Yellow and Blue, 1921. 

10.  Music Link: Buffalo Springfield, On The Way Home (1968)