This smug asshole just sent you a frustratingly brilliant rejoinder text after four days of silence. Photo via Flickr / CC.
A funny thing happened the other day. It was about 4pm. We've all been there: You've nearly crested the steep side of the proverbial afternoon wall and must stave off the thought that maybe you just don't have it in you even to plod down the long and winding staircase of the day's last mile. You'll be stuck there for eternity, you swear it. Hurry up and wait.
So there I am, suspended in that pitiless and all too familiar liminal space. GChat just isn't doing it anymore. I've gone idle, unable to find the words. My brain is fried. Spent.
Then I get a text from a buddy of mine, a childhood friend who lives on the other side of the country. We're only able to catch up in person once a year, if that. Like so many of our peers, we "stay in touch" almost exclusively through pithy messages that are as sporadic--days, even weeks can go by between texts, say--as they are cryptic and filed down to impeccably fine points. These are the precise and often slow-cooked rejoinders of a good-spirited contest of wits that never veers hostile, and that to almost anyone unfamiliar with our shared experiences, interests and wink-and-nod humor, would read like alien code. The air of this casually ongoing volley of one-upmanship never chokes on aggro saltiness. It's harmless, long-distance sparring of the mobile sort.
Anyway, his text slayed. It was the perfect retort to my last quip, the pinnacle of riposte in the so-called alone-together landscape of 2013. It was a truly bulletproof wisecrack, an exercise in the sort of stunningly tight copy that could've taken Strunk and White back to elementary school after sweeping those ink-stained old fogeys into the overflowing dustbin of needlessly verbose term papers from every undergraduate Philosophy 101 course ever, ever.
I won't go into the exact contents, only to say dude's 94-character jest was so finely zinged (zung?) that it compeletly numbed my already cooked brain. How was I even supposed to respond? How could I possibly top that?
I had no idea. I waited it out, naturally, setting on the unconscious backburner what I knew would eventually boil down to the perfect response after a few hours. By around 7pm, it showed up. I relayed it to my buddy and got nothing but radio-text silence in return, a sure sign that I'd stunned his ass. Wit, dropped. Zing, you son of a bitch.
Thing is, this sort of thing happens all the time. And I'll go out on a limb here and say that I know I'm not alone. It's at the point that I, we, do it almost without thinking, this wilfully drawn-out whittling of wisdom into compact and precision-guided comebacks.
It's all about time. One of the greatest ironies today is that nobody ever thinks there's ever enough time, but really we've got all the time in the world, for the most part. More and more of us have no choice but to remain jacked in, to remain connected for what feels like 24/7/365, and this just to eke out a living. Curiously, the second-nature means through which we continuously loop ourselves in--GChat, iChat, text, email, virtually any service that by this point is just taken for granted--afford us more than enough time to sharpen our knives and sculpt the zingers of our choosing. For better or worse, we are all the archetypes of comebacks, now.
Up is down is up is down in the time of tardy wisdom, via Flickr / CC.
Which is to say, there are now any number of ways to drastically cut back on missed opportunities. What could be thought of as "tardy wisdom" is becoming less and less the preserve of coulda-woulda-shoulda. It is now a defining characteristic of life in a time of almost limitless time.
It used to be that when an ideal thought came too late for conversation, that was that. In some ways that still very much holds. It's tough to say that a perfect response popping into your head after the window to a relevant face-to-face exchange has shut doesn't suck. Why? A shitty or off-base retort can have severe consequences in almost any social (or private) scenario. There you are, cursing yourself after the fact.
This is what's known as treppenwitz in German. The French call it l'esprit de l'escalier. In English, call it staircase wit or simply afterwit. It's the stuff of dead-horse beaten "scumbag brain" memery: An ideal remark--perhaps friendly, perhaps not--never sees the light of day because you're already gone. You've left the room. You're quite literally in the stairwell, on your way out and into the stinging air of missed opportunity. You had a good look at a parting shot, but you blew it.
Again, that's not to say staircase wit isn't any less of a potentially crippling phenomena in 2013 than it was in 1913. Yet we live in a Golden Age of a near-pitch perfect digital riposte. The realization that something better, or perfect, came to you too late is crushing, though these moments are becoming fewer and further between on account of the sheer relentlessness and pervasiveness of digital communications.
There you are on GChat, waffling over some smartass quip. Not coming to you yet? All good. Just wait it out; when it comes--because it pretty much always comes--drop that thing like a boss and play if off like you whipped it up on the spot. What's that? It's been two days, and that textbook text retort still isn't coming to you? All good. Just wait it out. Grit through the rest of the work day, let it come to you on the way home, and let 'er fly. This may be what Nietzche meant when he wrote that, "All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking."
It's a two-way street, or sidewalk, or staircase, of course. Days after lobbing that stunner too clever and brain numb-y to be topped, a funny thing happened. My friend responded. And once again, it was bloody brilliant, on point. Goddamnit. Just when I think I've done it, the guy eventually comes back and evens the score. But that's the game. Everyone eventually comes back with the best shit.
OK, not everyone. It's frustrating, yes, and while many of us are guilty here, it'd be wrong to say that all of us take all the time we're given (and more) to prove some sort of point through near-perfect witticisms. For all we know, some of us will always be too late in real life and online. The rest of us will always be late, too, but so long as we think we've got all the time in the world on our hands, there's no need to take the stairs.