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Thu., September 06, 2007 Elul 23, 5767

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Present continuous

By Pen Ultimate / Michael Handelzalts

In Israel August was hot and humid. Some like it hot, but I prefer it not. There are undoubtedly many good things about Israel (someone once asked a girl, "What do you see in the guy you're dating?" and she answered "Nothing, really, but there's a lot of fun in looking for it"), but the climate is definitely not one of them. So to the Netherlands I escaped, as its beautiful summer was far preferable to my body's decrepit cooling system. And when it rained there, I took refuge in a nice coffee house (not the one that serves other substances) and sipped my Irish coffee, acting like there is no tomorrow.

I like the phrase "like there is no tomorrow," both for its grammatically proper use of the word "like" (which is frequently used as a "padding" in conversation, filling in that split second when you need to come up with the right word), and also because, actually, according to Scarlett O'Hara ("Tomorrow is another day") and Macbeth ("Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow") - to quote only two literary sources - the only new thing under the sun, every day, is tomorrow.

But mainly I like the phrase because it is a corollary to the Roman poets' dictum "carpe diem." And while I try to seize the day, and it certainly is stealthy, I wonder which one of us will decide on the issue of "how long is the present."

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If you are one of the people who have been polled by PR and market-research gurus, who nowadays decide what the newspapers should write and how they should write it, you probably stopped reading at the end of the last paragraph. According to one expert - and I only heard him expressing this opinion very briefly - the average attention span of an average newspaper reader is about 15 seconds.

When I think about it, since I started working in the media business, I've been told that "short is beautiful": that was when we were broadcasting short opinion items on Army Radio in the beginning of the 1970s, and I have kept that in mind over the years when broadcasting or writing theater reviews, right after the curtain goes down on a press night. One of the bones of contention between me and the editor of Haaretz was once the length of book reviews. I liked them long; he liked them short.

For those who may not be in the know, by the way, "short" is the new "correct."

In front of the TV, I hold the remote-control and can decide how much time to allow the program I'm watching to last. I have an incentive to make my mind a.s.a.p. (I'm using an acronym, for brevity's sake) as there are many channels to choose from, and each one of them is an incentive to zap. The talking heads on the screen speak in sound bites, and if they don't, they are urged to do so by the anchors (and anchorettes?). Most of the programs come in bits and pieces, as commercials have to air also. The commercials are short, as time is money, but the clusters of them, one after the other, are long, much for the same reason. That is man as God has created him: easily bored, with a very short attention span.

I do know a toddler, a mere 2 years old (okay, so he is my grandson Uri), who can play for an unlimited amount of time with the same toy, and his attention is not easily diverted. Is it possible that the short attention span we assume is shared by most people is something nurtured by us? I mean, which came first: the egg of boredom or the chicken of diversion?

Running on time

Possibly I would not have dwelled on the issue at such length had I not been reading Jasper Fford's latest book "First Among Sequels," the fifth installment in the adventures of literary detective Thursday Next. In the series of books, one strand of the plot is being prodded by the ChronoGuard, a sort of "Law & Order"-like agency that guards the cloth of "Standard Line of Events." The ChronoGuard agents are being sent forward and backward in time in order to iron out irregularities without disturbing the whole fabric of history. The problem is that they do so using time machines, working under the assumption that science-fiction contraptions will eventually be invented and be put into use in the real world, the way things happened with space travel. When it becomes clear that there is no chance of reversing time, the ChronoGuard fears that time will stop and collapse unto itself. As it is, in the book's world, nobody read books anymore, and all prefer to watch short, sassy reality TV shows (and in the book they refer to British TV, mind you).

Thursday's 16-year-old son, Friday, explains: "The Long View has been eroded. We can't see beyond six months if that, and short-termism will spell our end. But the thing is, it needn't be that way - there's reason for it. The time engines don't just need vast quantities of power - they need to run on time. Not punctuality, but time itself. Even a temporal leap of a few minutes will use up an infinitesimally amount of the abstract concept. Not the hard clock time, but the soft stuff that keeps events firmly embedded in a small cocoon of prolonged events - the Now."

As it happens, the ChronoGuard have been mining the Now. If they continue to do so, Friday adds, "Within a few short years there won't be any Now at all, and the world will move into a dark age of eternal indifference." Which means that television can and will get even worse. "But easily digestible TV is not the cause - it's the effect. A short Now will also spell the gradual collapse of forward planning, and mankind will slowly strangulate itself in a downward spiral of uncaring self-interest and short-term instant gratification."

The book's plot, and ChronoGuard's existence, hinges on finding a recipe for unscrambling the eggs, something Thursday's uncle Mycroft was working on, when he was not busy trying to produce energy by causing fission of pasta and antipasti. But as it is a book, ultimately a work of fiction, all ends well, for Now. Present continuous is saved, for the time being.

Our Now gets shorter while I write and you read, not the least because someone - those who are selling airtime for commercials, which sell products, which replace products that will be advertised in commercials that will cut short programs - is profiting on the deal. And where one is proficient, someone else is deficient. His gains are your losses. That's the way it is today, which is tomorrow's yesterday. And as it will be, like, tomorrow.

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