Morning Thoughts

Someone posted a query on-line the other day as to whether listening to an audio version of a book constituted “reading” it. I have to submit my opinion as “yes.” Having chosen a profession that involves heavy travel, I’ve “read” many a work that way, first on tape, then on CD, and now downloaded onto my cell phone. A sample of the works I’ve read include Darwin’s Origin of the Species, the condensed version of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a number of Bill Bryson’s works, Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters, and most of the published books of the late Stephen Jay Gould. Some read better than others. Some carry more impact. For example, I found myself pulling into parking lots and delaying my arrival home in order to hear more of Nathaniel Philbrick’s In the Heart of the Sea.

Fiction can prove tricky, for it becomes more and more obvious the extent to which modern writers violate the last of Elmore Leonard’s “Ten Rules of Writing.” It recommends, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” It was easy to skip over superfluous jibber-jabber with tapes. One only had to punch the “forward” button as many times as necessary. With CDs, one had to skip tracks. Now, with downloaded audio, one loses entire chapters. It’s easier to tolerate the junk.

Worst, in modern fiction, are the ubiquitous and gratuitous sex-scenes. Dear me, in today’s America, anyone over the age of six is perfectly aware of what happens when two people succumb to the uncontrollable urges that the Apostle Paul warned about in First Corinthians. They occurred, he said, sometimes as a result of drinking the communion wine, but more often as a simple weakness to be avoided at all costs until the end of time, which was right around corner, a few months at most. Any righteous soul should be able to keep it zipped up that long and avoid the indecencies involved in the act, not to mention the eternal consequencies.

Oops, I’ve gotten off-track.

Facts are, there just isn’t much we can add in describing the act by now that isn’t portrayed nightly on TV. But we still try. I once had to endure a mystery novel’s sex scene that lasted from downtown Jonesboro, AR to well past Walnut Ridge, even with constant fast-forwarding past the most unseemly actions. Trust me, the description covered it all, and left one both exhausted and laboring under the strong belief that the two folks involved were each in desperate need of a hobby, one that didn’t involve a member of the opposite sex.

These days, I’m afraid, at least one sex scene looms as essential in a modern novel as the 58-minute car chase looms in modern movies. It wasn’t always that way. Consider the masters, the ones we really should be reading anyway. Here’s how Joseph Conrad described what we might call “The Grand Finale:”

“He swerved and, stepping up to her, sank to the ground by her side. Before she could make a movement, or even turn her head his way, he took her in his arms and kissed her lips. He tasted on them the bitterness of a tear fallen there. He had never seen her cry. It was like another appeal to his tenderness—a new seduction. The girl glanced round, moved suddenly away, and averted her face. With her hand she signed imperiously to him to leave her alone —a command which Heyst did not obey.”

That’s from “Victory,” and no, I don’t think the scene spawned the name of the book.

But wasn’t it sublime? I don’t believe that even the Apostle himself would have begrudged that little bit of hanky-panky.

How this could lead to some of the
 scenes I've read is the true mystery.