Something has happened to the attention span of the modern human being. Don’t believe me? Great. I’ll quote you this passage from Poe:

The Black Cat

(1845) E.A. Poe

FOR the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not – and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul. My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified – have tortured – have destroyed me. Yet I will not attempt to expound them. To me, they have presented little but Horror – to many they will seem less terrible than barroques. Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the common-place – some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects.

From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition. My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions. I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets. With these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them. This peculiarity of character grew with my growth, and, in my manhood, I derived from it one of my principal sources of pleasure. To those who have cherished an affection for a faithful and sagacious dog, I need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or the intensity of the gratification thus derivable. There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.

I married early, and was happy to find in my wife a disposition not uncongenial with my own. Observing my partiality for domestic pets, she lost no opportunity of procuring those of the most agreeable kind. We had birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat.

This latter was a remarkably large and beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree. In speaking of his intelligence, my wife, who at heart was not a little tinctured with superstition, made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise. Not that she was ever serious upon this point – and I mention the matter at all for no better reason than that it happens, just now, to be remembered.

Pluto – this was the cat’s name – was my favorite pet and playmate. I alone fed him, and he attended me wherever I went about the house. It was even with difficulty that I could prevent him from following me through the streets.

Our friendship lasted, in this manner, for several years, during which my general temperament and character – through the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance – had (I blush to confess it) experienced a radical alteration for the worse. I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my wife. At length, I even offered her personal violence. My pets, of course, were made to feel the change in my disposition. I not only neglected, but ill-used them. For Pluto, however, I still retained sufficient regard to restrain me from maltreating him, as I made no scruple of maltreating the rabbits, the monkey, or even the dog, when by accident, or through affection, they came in my way. But my disease grew upon me – for what disease is like Alcohol ! – and at length even Pluto, who was now becoming old, and consequently somewhat peevish – even Pluto began to experience the effects of my ill temper.

One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame. I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket ! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity.

Did you read all of that? Here, in the parlance of the age, allow me to compose a TLDR; Dude has addictions. Likes his cat. Likes his addictions better. Gets mad. Does something bad to the cat.

My next question is simple–did you enjoy reading it, or did you find yourself off-put by some of the vocabulary or felt that the description went on too long? Need I remind you, dear reader, that Poe is a master of the English language and is considered to be preeminent among writers for both ability and invention of the short story as a form? I digress, perhaps, by heaping virtue upon a reputation that needs no further accolades or endorsements. However, my purpose, recondite as it is, has not been revealed. It was not, necessarily, to draw your attention to the greatness of Poe but rather to use Poe as a kind of medium by which I might subtly switch my verbiage without the complete conscious awareness of the reader. Because you read Poe, your mind is now more open to a vocabulary that is at once wider but also more complex. You are not expecting the read to be easy nor are you thinking the tale that will be told will necessarily be short. For you, vis-à-vis the introduction of Poe, you are prepared for more arduous things or else you have stopped reading and moved on to some other manner of gratification that is more instant.

I do not find the difference in our language conventions to be what I would term better. They are, if anything, shorter and more ambiguous. To gain specificity, however, one must acquire a larger vocabulary from which to distinguish an idea in variance and variety. Rather, our language has become more like computer code, which is precise in detail, generally, but takes more effort to convey sufficient amounts of higher level details in the form of easily understood abstractions. In short, there seems to me to be a subtle grooming toward being more akin to something like Artificial Intelligence–able to consider large sums of information–but not especially inventive in the application of the brush with which to paint the experience. While the berth of possibilities grows exponentially with every large language model, there is something that cannot be conveyed by a machine which is the subtle nuance with which a writer such as Poe conveys a tale. Here, he is really telling us about the demon he faces–alcohol.

Our world intersects with Poe’s in a most unexpected way–or perhaps such coincidences are but signposts on a well-traveled highway. In Arabic, alcohol is called by the name of a demon-star, which is called Algol. Sometimes this word translates also as “Ghoul”. Likewise, it, by happenstance, is also a computer language. The Greeks likened the star to Medusa’s Head. The implication of course, is that the star and its influence, as per Poe, jumped, and inflicted something on the object of his affections, the cat. The experience then was to make Poe the author of his own ghoulish actions. A subtle turn for a Twilight Zone tale. If you do not kill the beast, perhaps you shall become it.

More nuanced, however, is re-conditioning the mind and the words of humanity into a lull where the expectation and instant gratification is high. The internet has no shortage of words, but those who utilized them as Poe does are few and far in between. For one thing, we no longer tend to value such tales or those who use such language. It’s too wordy, it takes too long, it isn’t on Tik Tok. Think very carefully about this, however. This manner of writing made a person have to desire to understand the narrative. One might, especially in other Poe tales, have recourse to a dictionary. How often do you look the words up you read now? If you are not in a literature course, probably not frequently as the odds that you are reading something requiring more than an eighth grade comprehension are small. Do you know why? Because everything is written that way so that people will not have to work to understand what is meant. The resulting gruel we are fed is little better than Gerber baby food that has been twice digested.

The demon star was known for winking, and it is interesting here, that Poe, after removing the eye of the cat, has the cat always effectively winking since something that only has one eye cannot but help but wink by the absence of the other eye. It may be that what has happened is that in cutting out the eye that offends our laziness that we have diminished our ability to appreciate good writing and diverse points of view that require something called…work. Maybe effort, which precedes work is a better word. Either way, it becomes rather obvious once pointed out against a classic like Poe what has become of our brain rhythms. They have been hijacked–possibly by the “algo"rithms. Give me my zaps, my attention, my ad revenue, my thumbs up. Do not make me work. Make me react with the least possible effort.

We tend to treat, as a whole, people who write like Poe as being crazy or difficult. Maybe Poe was crazy. He certainly is regarded as a genius. Somewhere along the way, the designation of genius has slipped because it requires effort to recognize. It is easier to sip on one’s alcohol of expected experience and to not tarry beyond its confines. It is predictable–the same neural path we have trod a thousand times–until it is not. It may be, that like Poe, we are summoning some demon that causes us to cut out our own eyes as we have offended our own artistic senses. We are sluggards looking for the next high–the next fix. Don’t make us work for it, man. Give it to us now; give it to us fast! We don’t have time for anything other than the “next thing” that we don’t need. Such are the symptoms of end-stage consumption. It doesn’t engage the soul.

While this bit of a “voice in the wilderness” began with the idea that something was done to the human attention span, we find at the end that that characterization has shifted. Rather, something has been done to the soul. The soul exults over things the flesh finds tedious. The reward of the works of the flesh are generally fast pleasures that are just as fleeting. Rather than cutting out our eyes, a more dystopian horror might be that we have lobotomized our souls. That, is a hell not even Poe could imagine. At least for him, he was feeling bad for what he did to his cat while he was drunk. We don’t feel bad while we are drunk. We just expect everyone else to join us in our favorite cocktail.