I just skipped the description, I didn’t miss much… Did I?

No-one wants descriptions these days, they haven’t got the patience. Oh God, great long boring description. I skipped it. Didn’t miss much.

I was just thinking how fortunate we are to have such a wonderful luxury. In the past reading was one of the affordable pleasures and Dickens published his work in a series of magazines which were not too expensive. But at that time travel was prohibitively expensive, so there were plenty of people who had never seen the sea (there still are…) How were they to imagine the raging storm in which Ham drowned in David Copperfield? Only if Dickens described it for them.

Or If they lived out woop-woop, how would they conjure the towering heights of the skyscrapers in a New York City they had never visited. And without the help of Fantasy Gaming, what would Ghormenghast look like if it wasn’t described by the pen of a Master?

Nowadays, images of things we have never personally witnessed are flashed before us in a thronging procession of fact and fiction. We have a visual and sometimes an aural feast relentlessly thrust at us  in two dimensions on screens varying from a few centimetres to tens of metres. We assume that we know what a thing is, because we have seen it. We are presented with a word and our brains click into overdrive with pictures and possibilities.

Desert – and there it is, in all the glory of Lawrence of Arabia, or perhaps a news video of war in the middle east, or famine in Africa. Yep, I know desert, now get on with it, what’s next …

What we know is an image of a desert. What we may not know, unless we have been to one, is the smell of the desert, the sound of the desert, the searing heat or freezing cold of the desert, or how a desert can sap your strength and deceive your senses. Our eyes, always dominant, always arrogant, think they know it all. And trampled underfoot are all the other senses and the delicious wonder of an unfolding description that takes you–all of you–into the heart of itself. The wondrous art of loading words with sensual meaning, that takes you far below the superficial look of something, to wrap you up in its soul.

But isn’t that just, so today – never mind the depth, just skim the surface. There’s nothing but murk down there anyway.

Viva! Virginia Woolf, Émile Zola, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky et al and the long, delectable, all-consuming description.