Twit lit

Reading a Charles Dickens novel is like riding bumper cars. It’s fun at the time, but you’re a little sore afterward.

 

Somebody living in the 19th century, as Dickens did, would scoff at that assertion. “Pray, explain yourself!” they’d declare in a haughty English accent. “For ’tis no great exertion navigating the fineries of a proper tongue, lest you hail from the brutish class, uneducated and mired in an unseemly ignorance!” Then, while you’re decoding their sentence structure, they’d silently be wondering what the hell a bumper car was.

 

There’s a learning curve to that ornate version of the language, sure. But it’s worth the effort to read it. Dickens was a man of great imagination, with sharply drawn characters and a wry humor, understated in its uniquely British way. There’s a reason he’s lumped in with the “classics,” and it’s not because he’s been dead longer than bell bottoms.

 

If it wasn’t for school, though, would anybody bother with him anymore? It’s hard to imagine a milennial – growing up amidst Twitter, Instagram and the like – having the patience for that sort of thing.

 

Consider Twitter for a second. This social media/messaging application imposes a 140-character limit on its users, which is barely enough space to describe a sparrow fart. And if you follow most Twitter users for any length of time, that’s pretty much the standard subject matter. Brevity has its place, but being bound by such limiting shackles means its participants can’t expound on a subject, fleshing out their thoughts with this wonderful thing called language, with all of its nuance and shading. Everything gets whittled down to an easily digestible nugget. So instead of practicing the art of reading and writing, Tweeters practice the art of stripping down, of removing anything that isn’t the gooey chocolate center. How many licks does it take? None, apparently.

 

This is troubling. Because the candy coating is where the good stuff is.

 

I’m going to take a chance on something possibly pretentious and cite a study. It’s not very often that I do this kind of thing, because studies are usually boring, and most people – myself included – would rather be engaged in an activity with greater entertainment value, like shoeing horses, or pasting glitter to posterboard. (I have no idea what people do nowadays.) This study is kind of cool, though. It’s about what reading different kinds of fiction does to the brain.

 

In 2013, psychologists at the New School for Social Research in New York found that literary fiction “enhances the ability to detect and understand other peoples’ emotions,” according to an article in The Guardian. This better prepared people to navigate complex social relationships.

 

In other words, people functioned better in their lives because they read “Great Expectations,” say, instead of Kanye West’s live tweets from the MTV Video Music Awards.

 

The idea goes something like this: A work of literary fiction delivers characters who are, in some sense, incomplete. The content of their character is found between the lines, not necessarily on them – which means the reader is left to fill in the gaps, becoming an active participant in the storytelling.

 

Transferring that reading experience into real-world situations is a natural leap, argue the study authors, because the same psychological processes are used in real-life relationships. It’s an interesting theory, indicating that a heavy reader is better equipped to handle a job interview or business meeting than someone who spends the majority of their time making papier-mâché masks of fat Elvis. These psychological benefits manifest themselves when the reading material at hand skews to the literary, as opposed to young-adult novels about hunky, misunderstood teenage vampires. “Twilight” on the john doesn’t count, which is bad news for e-book poopers everywhere.

 

Bottom line: Reading is a better use of one’s time than, for instance, ripping your way through a 30-rack of Miller High Life and watching old reruns of “The Dukes of Hazzard.”

 

To be clear, the prescription here isn’t, “Drop all your hobbies and read the classics, dip.” That would be absurd, because not only does it amount to a homework assignment, but some hobbies are just too great to pass up. Photography. Glass blowing. Streaking naked across a football field with lit sparklers stuck in various bodily orifices. These are all fantastic hobbies, and it’s unrealistic to think that someone would drop them in favor of reading 19th century English literature. People have lives, and occasionally those lives involve more than just a dusty old tome and a creaky armchair pockmarked with mustard stains.

 

But digital distractions are subpar alternatives, corroding attention spans like acid corrodes metal. The Internet is a wonderful communication tool, and it’s nice being able to see someone slam their crotch into the bars of a jungle gym on a whim. I just wonder what the younger generations will be like, knowing little else.

 

If we start tweeting out Dickens line by line, there may yet be some hope.