Once upon a time we used written words to recollect. Before cameras, smartphones, selfies, motion pictures. When digitize didn’t mean what you think.

Anyone who could not write had hardly lived – for what is a life but recollection? Imagine if all that remained of your life were the scraps you recalled. Now we take snapshots, paste albums, Google to remind. Who hasn’t been to Venice!

Writers back then – we’re talking a century ago – recorded life’s facts. Newspapers and books dispatched their accounts. Writers wrote travel books that were all words! These days travel books are mostly pictures with captions. Reading words takes work.

Recently I’ve been revisiting Stephen Crane. When did you last hear of Stephen Crane? An American, turn of the twentieth century, The Red Badge of Courage, a few other stories perhaps, died young, that’s it. Why Stephen Crane now? I pause, perplexed. Because I found his book in my hand? While true, that explains nothing. Perhaps because more and more I see myself as a result. There’s a reason I chose what I chose, did what I did. I am standing in a line, following others, who were following others. I’m curious, while there’s still time, who preceded me in my queue.

Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was a wunderkind of American letters, when “letters” were a big deal. Strong with the strength of early maturity, having survived its Civil War, America hankered for its own literature to rival the Europeans’. Stephen Crane dashed off his bestseller, The Red Badge of Courage, in his early twenties. Arguably our most vivid story about our most searing contest, this slim novel was written by a non-soldier born five years after that war ended: how on earth! Stephen Crane wrote a lot – he was hot – and then he died at – you do the math.

I read The Red Badge of Courage in high school. Do students still? I’m betting “old” books are less assigned these days, as relentless indefatigable commerce clears the way for the new. Who can make money reprinting “classics”? Besides, isn’t war politically incorrect? Granted, Americans witness mass shootings at schools – several a month, it seems – and politicians purportedly not insane advocate arming students – but that’s not war, that’s, well, something else.

The Red Badge of Courage is a surprisingly good read. I say surprisingly because mostly childhood’s titles disappoint: we’ve outgrown them, see their faults, detect their tricks. A few authors escape the merciless triage of maturation, fewer still improve with age.

The Red Badge of Courage got better. Man, can this guy write! He experiences this battle (which he never saw) with cinematic intensity. He splashes metaphors fearlessly, sometimes recklessly, and by golly, they work! His soldiers’ gruff dialect sounds like them. (We forego writing dialect these days: it feels condescending, colonialist.)

Crane’s slender tale has no plot to speak of – a rookie private survives his first battle – yet its pages turn. How did Crane envision this experience so exactly! I want to know more about this prodigy, rifle his works in search of him, but where is he? Nowadays we use prose for different purposes – not to show what cameras can convey more convincingly, but to confide, confess. We write to introduce and endear ourselves. Today’s literature bristles with ME.

Crane wrote to show his readers what they would never see otherwise, except via report. Here’s what it was like to be an ordinary soldier in the bafflement of battle. His prose is see-through, like a polished window; he does not confide.

Today Crane would be making movies, not literature. That’s where the money is.