We try to compress life into easy-to-swallow portions followed by bits of clip art copied and pasted from simple Google searches, but you can’t summarize human emotion in keywords, or even casual conversation. Hell, not even deep conversation over candlelight in a room far too small to be lit poorly in the first place. A pinprick in the wallpaper would bring in enough light to expose the doctored small talk — thick Sharpie strikes through the letter of life. We can’t do this. Anything worth saying can’t be cut down into 12 bolded bullets because they just devalue us. Slashing "Star Wars" into key moments doesn’t translate, doesn’t speak, a film. Nitpicking a poet’s "Collected" just to find great one-liners is malpractice; it’s a scalpel incising unnecessary entry wounds just to find that everything beneath the title was the best one-liner. To quote J. Alfred Prufrock’s love obsession, “that is not what I meant at all.” Art isn’t a 20-dollar bill you can just get change for and toss whichever bills you don’t want into a pretzel barrel on top of the fridge for "safekeeping," because there's nothing safe about putting great thoughts away.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if I formatted this like a listicle?
1. Yeah,
2. it
3. would
4. be.
Listicles, in essence, are just like Sparknotes. Sure, you didn’t have enough time to read "King Lear" before your class discussion, but that doesn’t mean you should pick out the highlights from life just to make its burden lighter. Not to make this an existential rant, but the in-betweens, the connecting ligaments made up of sidewalk blocks, alleyway dandelions, criss-crossed telephone lines, and simply waiting for the next highlight to hit are just as memorable as the bolded bullets because they’re what gets us to what we live to remember. If life went like listicles, we’d be living highlight-to-highlight with no room for simple pleasures.
And it’ll be after we die that we realize we needed the in-betweens, the couches, the commercials, to really feel like we had lived at all. If we base our lives of the “big” moments, the little ones are as insignificant as we make the check engine light feel, a light that wants to draw more attention than it does. If we seek the “big” moments in life and live as frivolously as robot Instagram users live, we’re just playing into the popularity cafeteria line of existence, trying to stomach refried fame and day-old memes. We know better than forming a single-file line, feet falling like tracks in deep snow, precise. We’re better than the assembly line conveyor belt we’re born onto, pushing us down the line, outfitting us with the same thoughts, dress, perception, ignoring the fact that we’re human, just slapping a serial number on our futures and pushing us out the door, unaware of everything.
If we live under the guidelines of listicles and litter our bodies with rehashed, overly reproduced meme garbage, we’re leaving out the moments of reflections, the moments that solidify the “big” moments in our memories. If there are no lulls, really, there can be nothing worth remembering.
