Delayed Gratification
Right after finishing the Hobbit book, I was very keen on continuing with the Lord of the Rings. It was the previous millennium, the movie nowhere in sight, and the bookstores in my hometown were not well supplied.
They had just the second volume.
Undaunted, I had it bought, and my infant imagination jumped right into the plot — it starts with Boromir dying (who was Boromir?), some two blokes Frodo and Sam being gone (and they don’t appear until the second half of the book), and Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli forming some hunting group to find other missing blokes. Well — I actually thought for quite a while that Legolas and Gimli were of the same race. The book was not meant to be split in this way.
Still, it was a marvelous read.
I did not have internet access back then, so could not “check” the backgrounds of characters on a wiki. None of my friends had read it back then — so I could not ask them.
Some time after finishing it, maybe half a year, I obtained the first volume, and, yet later on, the third as well, and then Silmallirion. At times, reading resembled a grinding research — when I was not sure why someone did something, or who was who, I dug back through the previous books, page by page.
…
Around that time, I was watching the Digimon TV series (you can say, quite a degradation from Lord of the Rings — but then, there was not much on TV in those years. Power Rangers and Xena, basically).
I missed a crucial episode with a big villain fight against Devimon, who was spreading the Black Gears in the Digiworld. I missed it, because it aired early on the weekend — conflicting with a family trip.
No wiki to check, no replay to watch, no friends to ask (they may have been watching as well, but if that were the case, all of us were too shy to admit that publicly). It took till today, for the sake of this essay, for me to look up that Angemon’s heroic sacrifice did the job.
…
Anyway, fast forward till today— I’m just reading the third book in the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Having downloaded all the pdfs to my reader. After checking before that the series is finished already (thank you, Mr. Martin, for teaching us that lesson).
I stumble upon a slightly confusing part with an unknown character — so I check out on my phone the character on the wiki for this series, accidentally hitting a major spoiler for the whole book, possibly for the whole series.
I am happy — no longer do I need to struggle, or wait, or be surprised.
Meanwhile, my wife is binge watching some TV show, at her convenience, as the Netflix subscription is not obstructed by any sort of family trips.
Goodbye patience, gratification comes now.
…
Back to Tolkien.
He wrote an essay, On Fairy-Stories, which is, in short… damn.
No “in short” from me. Just go read it, it’s cool stuff.
…
Would I like to be back in that world of limited possibilities? Probably not — both cases, that is, reading books out of order, and not seeing crucial episodes, are not worth it. There is some magic to that, but too much of the self-hurt kind, I think. No laments of “childhood was better” here.
But then, the thrill of not knowing, of discovering at a certain pace — that is a rare thing, easy to be lost in today’s world. It took me quite some retrospective to realize how abusive can the instant access to information be.
Even having encountered the term “Delayed Gratification” so much earlier before, having read all those Kahneman, Gladwell, Ariely, whoever, books.
I’m switching back now, pen and paper at hand while reading books, putting down notes, researching back when needed on my own, just by digging back.
With Ctrl-F speeding up the task, of course — there is no magic in linear brute force search. And, after a series is over and my explanatory brain engine exhausted, I’ll happily check all the wealth of internet.
The best of both worlds. Patience, welcome back. Willpower, nice to meet you.
