Reader's Digest isn't.
At least, it isn't for readers, and it doesn't digest. It just sits in the bottom of the stomach, a solid and fibrous lump of factual material. The presumption, or irresponsibility of its editors is that the words of storytellers and article-writers can be pared and peeled until we only have what is most essential. It's a life-worsening premise, and the refusal of writers alone to come near it should end its reign as one of the most widely read periodicals. Think about the premise. It is the opposite of poetry which says that, if anything, what's valuable in writing can be reduced to the style and structure of the words themselves. And because poets put their love of words first and foremost in their medium, they are the only ones immune to the Abridgers. I remember discovering RD when I was young, and thinking it a treasure. I didn't have any wise sage around me at this formative period of my life, no one to warn me what I had found.
"It's like a Twinkie, son. The promise is that you can have all the taste of a real pastry, but it sits on the shelf conveniently for you, already packaged and preserved." And RD isn't alone in their treachery. Don DeLillo is considered one of the best writers of English sentences alive. He wrote
Underworld, a beautifully written novel, which starts out, "He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a gleam in his eye that's halfway hopeful." Now somewhere out there is an audio book giving us the kernel of his story. Perhaps it starts out, "He speaks English, and his eyes are hopeful." We still get what we need right? The only sacrifice is the beauty of the language, one of the best reasons to read.
Okay, I recognize that the process of condensing involves removing chunks, not rewriting. But why, once having started so well, don't we continue? Why don't we simplify the colors of a Monet or a Chagall, so it doesn't take as much staring to get the same understanding? Why don't we have 15-minute movies? Why don't we make CDs of Bach's music reduced to the melody line, so we get the tunes without all of the counterpoint and embellishment? In fact, why, if it were possible, shouldn’t we live for only 40 years, and just experience the best part?
Maybe it sounds like sheer intellectual hubris, and I may be oversimplifying or overstating, but it’s at least worth considering from this different perspective. And I should qualify the thought. One could get the idea that I am saying a writer's words are such gold that to take away one letter, one comma, one phrase, would be to reduce the work to worthlessness.
I don't think anything of the sort. It is the nature of writing that makes one so able to cut and chop. There is never enough editing, never enough revising, and so we never get a 100%, fully finished and polished work. We get maybe 80% in the best of the lot, and the rest is definitely less essential. But who presumes to know why a writer includes a paragraph, phrases a sentence a certain way, or makes a book 375 instead of 373 pages? Why are we after bare story, and care so little about style? Why do we mess with someone else's year or ten-year's effort?
What we lose in the trade isn't worth the cut. We are too busy for the other words, I guess. We only want what someone else ruthlessly judges as "necessary" without what is labeled "expendable." We want our beauty faster, our facts delivered without as much analysis.
But maybe the 30 years we would cut off of our life to only live the best of it, maybe the paragraph that is never seen again, has more to say about life than some of the stuff retained. Maybe the imperfections, the boredom, the unhappy stretches, have as much to teach us as the shining characters and the blunt, direct narrative.
Maybe,
Reader's Digest isn't.
