When I was young and physical media reigned supreme, I naturally fell into the fallacy of assuming bigger must obviously be better: a long novel is obviously smarter than a short novel; a long movie more important than a short movie; a double-album more impressive than a single-disc. Maybe it was just because film tickets and CDs and hard-cover books were all roughly the same exorbitantly high price anyways, so we wanted more bang for our buck, such that we actually felt cheated if the album only had, like, 10 songs on it, or if the DVD clocked in at under 80 minutes, or if the short-story only wrapped up in 5 pages, or what have you.

Don’t get me wrong: give me a good, long, in-depth essay any day of the week! But it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that the Lord of the Rings Director’s Cut is weaker than the Theatrical; that The Hobbit was ruined by being turned into a trilogy; that Pink Floyd’s The Wall would’ve been better served as a single-album; that it is a fun party game to list off how many merely good LPs, with some judicious cuts, would’ve made excellent 7-song EPs; that a 2-minute Punk song can sometimes do more than a 20-minute Prog suite; that the Star Wars original releases are superior to the “Special Editions”; that I can’t name you one solitary character or scene from Henry James’ A Portrait of a Lady but can recite the entire plot of The Turn of the Screw; that Carlos Fuentes packs more Mexican history and magic into 80 pages of Aura than into 800 pages of Terra Nostra; that Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is more emotionally impactful than all of David Copperfield or Bleak House; that the first 20 minutes of Pixar’s Up is more memorable than the entire rest of the film; that the 30×21 Mona Lisa is more famous than the innumerable wall-sized masterpieces that surround it; that Wordsworth’s “We Are Seven” is more moving than the whole of “The Preludes”; that Shakespeare’s sonnets are rightfully quoted far more than his long poems; that Joyce’s “The Dead” can get under your skin far more than Ulysses; that “This Is Water” expresses David Foster Wallace’s life-philosophy far more fully than all of Infinite Jest; that Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea expresses his ethos more purely than all his other novels combined; that Edgar Allan Poe wrote only one novel and then rightfully wrote only short-stories thereafter; that Jorge Luis Borges was absolutely correct to say that, “It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books–setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes”; that silence can be more unnerving than a scream; that brevity really is the soul of wit; that an empty chapel can be more edifying than a full one; that “Love One Another” can convert you more than all 8 verses of “I Believe In Christ.”

That the Spirit does not multiply words, and therefore neither should we.