The Sea Wolf

I started reading Jack London's The Sea Wolf  before my trip to Hawaii. It wasn't in anticipation or anything, it was just one of the free downloads I had on my iBooks app on my phone. (And I have discovered that having something on hand  to read greatly reduces my stress when I find myself in situations that require patience.)
Anyway, so I was reading the book on my phone. As my departure date grew near, and as I read on, I decided that I really would prefer a hard copy (I know I am so old-school!), and so hit up the local used book store the day before we left. To my surprise they had both books I was looking for. The afore mentioned and another by Mark Twain.
It was a an excellent book. Not at all what I was expecting, but a good read none-the-less. To be honest I am still not sure I have grasped its full meaning. To be even more honest I am not sure if there even was one. Like Call of the Wild, it was sort of violent and commonly depicted the unfairness of life, and it's fragility, but then it was philospohical to a certain extent too. But it was the words themselves made it worth while.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I think that the world was a better place when people actually took the time to think about and describe their thoughts in detail. Now days everything is all about how fast you can get something done, or how much information you can cram into the smallest space. And in modern terms what I find so wonderful about old books is what people call "long winded". And while I agree that sometimes people can take too long to say something, I really do think that we have gone too far the other way in not saying enough, and that the descriptiveness of the old writers awakens something within me that drives me to savor moments and thoughts in a way that is becoming exceedingly rare. I'm afraid there is an awareness and a sense of living that is becoming extinct in out modern hurried world because we are loosing the ability to describe our lives even to ourselves.
What do I mean? Here is an example.

EXAMPLE 1
Quote from Sea Wolf: "...the poor wretch was weeping again over his misfortunes. Less difficult was it to guess whom he hated than whom he did not hate. For I had come to see a malignant devil in him which impelled him to hater all the world. I sometimes thought that he hated even himself so grotesquely had life dealt with him, and so monstrously. At such moments a great sympathy welled up within my, and I felt shame that I had ever enjoyed his discomfiture or pain. Life had been unfair to him. It had played him a scurvy trick when it fashioned him into the thing he was, and had played him scurvy tricks ever since. What chance had he for being anything else than he was?"


Modern interpretation: "OMG, he's such a douche bag. But I kinda feel sorry for him. He's still
a bastard tho.

EXAMPLE 2
Quote from Sea Wolf:  "As for myself, I was oppressed with nightmare. The day had been like

some horrible dream.  Brutality had followed brutality, and flaming
passions and cold-blooded cruelty had driven men to seek one another's
lives, and to strive to hurt, and maim, and destroy.  My nerves were
shocked.  My mind itself was shocked.  All my days had been passed in
comparative ignorance of the animality of man.  In fact, I had known life
only in its intellectual phases.  Brutality I had experienced, but it was
the brutality of the intellect--the cutting sarcasm of Charley Furuseth,
the cruel epigrams and occasional harsh witticisms of the fellows at the
Bibelot, and the nasty remarks of some of the professors during my
undergraduate days.

That was all.  But that men should wreak their anger on others by the
bruising of the flesh and the letting of blood was something strangely
and fearfully new to me.  Not for nothing had I been called "Sissy" Van
Weyden, I thought, as I tossed restlessly on my bunk between one
nightmare and another.  And it seemed to me that my innocence of the
realities of life had been complete indeed.  I laughed bitterly to
myself, and seemed to find in Wolf Larsen's forbidding philosophy a more
adequate explanation of life than I found in my own.

Modern interpretation: "The most f-d up day of MY LIFE! What is the world coming 2?!? Am totally freaked out.

Do you see what I mean? Sure there are a million faster ways of getting the point across, but you loose so much of the nuance, and the moment when you strip it down to the bare bones. Things, thoughts and people loose their uniqueness when they are condensed. We take complex situations butcher them into brief phrases, incomplete sentences, sometimes down to singular letters even! and then try to pass them off as descriptions of reality. And I don't like it.

I guess it is just a matter of preference, but I for one would rather think and feel in many words, in specific ones that might be long or not as long as they are accurate. Words that bear proof of the many and lengthy thoughts that proceed them and bore them onto the page to become a physical reality of what once was only energy.

Modern interpretation: Twitter sucks.