If brevity is the soul of wit: The Pocket University 9 August 2023
Some epitaphs, a poem on age, and a poem on courtship. Matthew Prior is a minor name in English poetry, but that's no reason his small poems can't have a large influence on any one of us.
Before Polonius in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet tells the queen that her son is crazy, he shares another of his wonderful aphorisms about how keeping it short in words is the smart choice. This is supposed to be ironic (we all think), because Polonius is a windbag, and his advice is usually hypocritical and not to be believed, even if it sounds good.
Social media, however, often believes a variation on this: ’Tis better to be short and appealing, than long and lose you. Tweets are like bad Zen koans. TikToks break up two-hour movies into 12 cliffhanger clips totaling 15 minutes. Facebook and Instagram says, just show me a picture.
I do not disagree. It might be more appealing to make it short, but that doesn’t mean you’re anything deep. In keeping it short, you’re wasting time (which is necessary and fun oftentimes). You’re assessing status (ahead or behind your favorite family, frenemies or celebrities).
Here, in today’s Pocket University selection, we get a shockingly short collection from a largely unknown writer: Matthew Prior.1 I’ll present the selections in their entirety below.
This was interesting because his contributions here were so short. He was bad-ass enough, though, as a secret agent and a man of his times, to earn a burial place at Westminster Abbey.
It was also interesting, because these selections jumped around in Volumes 9 and 10, and that reminded me the Pocket University editors have collected like works together in particular books, and the choice to read volumes straight through or use the Guide to Daily Reading volume is an option. I, personally, think this is genius: Give those interested in a particular kind of genre (essays, nonfiction, science, poetry, fiction, plays, etc.) volumes to read right through or as that genre spirit moves them. And give folks who want to be guided through some reading curriculum the option to jump around, like a well-catered playlist, through a year or multiple years.
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