As the times grew faster, a scarcity of time followed. Further divisions of minutes demanded precision, but also called for truncating the duration of time one spent in various indulgences. “Short and precise”, became the norm, a household phrase. From simply being a phrase that could be heard in the entrepreneurial world as a start-up culture arose, it also took its turn in penetrating other worlds, like cooking, and writing. “Short and precise” became a manner of expression.

It may have worked wonders in entrepreneurship, where maximising profits was the goal; in terms of cooking, precision can always help, and once in a while an accidental invention like salted chocolate could well turn out to be a good idea, but limiting the time duration is always a handicap – thus arose processed food. In terms of writing, one can always argue mass communication theories on how people of our times have reduced attention span, read lesser words, plus you want to reach as many people as possible and convey the meaning without losing their limited 60-word attention span; the tiny tales leave a more open-ended interpretation, one is afforded a more flexible license of imagination, it is abstract and thus beautiful. In writing, an author with a good conscience would try to avoid clichés, and thus find a new approach, a new writing style, a new set of words for the description of the ordinary. In essence, seek an untrodden expression. But the current norm of “short and precise” in writing, is almost paradoxical too. In our ecstatic feeling, when we find ourselves in presence of a divine form of art, of music, of writing, we simply end up calling it wonderful, or beautiful, or exquisite; browsing through our limited set of adjectives. Our one-word expression, is short, but hardly precise. We fail to understand what we feel, and thus fail to express. Marcel Proust, after witnessing a concert with his close friend and fellow writer, Lucien Daudet, gave him an unforgettable lesson in expression. Lucien Daudet hummed vague notes of Beethoven’s 9^th symphony and exclaimed, “That’s a wonderful bit”. But Proust only laughed and replied, “But my dear Lucien, it’s not your poum, poum, poum that’s going to convey this wonderfulness! It would be better to try and explain it!”* To explain and express the wonderfulness, a precise account of it would hardly be short. Lucien’s feelings would not be limited to the harmonic setting of vibrations that form music, but has also been affected by his company, the lighting, the movement of the musicians; the experience is influenced by the entirety for which no short account could have done justice.

This is not to say that the shorter forms of expression, like Haiku, Cinquain, or terribly tiny tales, are imprecise. They too have virtues, and are strong forms of writing, the limitation in words is an identity, and thus tend to be highly imaginative and expressive. But in times like ours, where we call ourselves to be living a fast-paced life, where we say we do not have time, where shorter form of literature is not promoted for expression but because longer forms fall beyond our reading capacity; the longer forms like Proust’s 7 volumes of ‘In Search of Lost Time’ or Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’, have become an endangered writing style, much like our Blue whales. It is not the call for shorter forms of expression, but the reasons to do so. To demand shorter forms of writing to save time, betrays the very essence of expression. Writing, as a form of expression, was meant for those who appreciated the expressed, who sought to understand expression, and deliberate; who wished to be enlightened, for any form of expression is for enlightenment; but instead writing has now become a tool catering to the uninterested, in our quest for reaching to the masses. To not have time to read, in its very argument suggests the unimportance given to the expression, the written.

The art of writing such long proses, or epics, sits unattended, dusted, inside the city walls where lives are lived within seconds, and seconds and minutes are saved in glass jars that keep falling off the slanting shelf. With the time we save in refraining from indulging in such forms of expressions, somewhere we have forgotten what to do of our saved time, and what is it that we have been saving our time for. An excerpt from ‘The Little Prince’, showcases just that when the little prince asks a merchant who sold pills that would quench his thirst for a week and thus save time, “And what do I do with those fifty-three minutes?”

“Anything you like…”

“As for me, if I had fifty-three minutes to spend as I liked, I should walk at my leisure toward a spring of fresh water.”**

Writing was never meant to be governed by the principles of marketing, to express what the masses could appreciate, accept, understand; to serve in a form of expression that masses could find convenient. Writing was meant to be governed by expression, to convey the aggregate of the thoughts, feelings, experience; in a form that can justify the expression, be it short or long. And if an experience, thought, feeling commends a thousand words to be expressed, it most certainly does; instead of a phrase “a thousand words fall short.” To say “words fall short”, sounds romantic, and while one may only mean to convey appreciation, it hardly does any justice. It does not explain the feeling, and in its truest of sense, only conveys that words are inferior, and that one has hardly understood what one is feeling, and thus failing to explain the feeling; also that it becomes a cliché. The problem with clichés is not that the phrase is not delightful, but that it has been overused and simplified, and now it no longer conveys in originality what one feels, but simply remains a superficial phrase. To express such a wonderful feeling in the words, “words fall short”, is also, rightly admitting that the 3-worded phrase does fall short, and that it requires a better representation.

If we have just seen a painting that puts us under its awe, and we find ourselves speechless, then it is because the painting has aroused innumerable thoughts and feelings in us that it cannot be grasped in those mere seconds or minutes. To understand and explain what we feel, we simply cannot put it as, “the painting says a thousand words”. The painting does say a thousand words, but only if one does happen to write a thousand words. A painting is also an expression, but it does not explain the feeling, the explanation lies in what we write about the painting, the experience; and a true account that fits with what we had felt then, is going to be the one where we can finally say, “I have put it in words, and it is as wonderful as my experience.”

It would also be wrong to say that words reduce the experience to simply, words. Words are not lowly; words are not a redundant form of expression. Words are meaningful, and the epitome of written expression. If what one has written does not do justice to what one means to convey, then it probably does not; not because the words have reduced its meaning or brought it down, but because we have not yet conveyed it in a justifiable manner. Let us put forth our feelings in words, because this is how we will learn to understand the depth of our feelings, and learn how to express – the enlightenment.

*How Proust Can Change Your Life – Alain de Botton

**The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry