The question on everyone's lips when I tell them I study culture, art, stories and language: what for? who could it help? you can't cure someone with a story!Yes you can!
Why is it so hard to remember that words can kill, wreak havoc, and bring salvation? All the stories we hear, read, see, imagine, shape both our perception of the world and our sense of self. People have used stories to undertake crusades. Forget about their power, and tyrants won't even have to burn books anymore. Remove stories from humankind, and the one thing left to distinguish us from other animals will be soap.
So, funny how this world, which is made of stories, so easily dismisses them as trivial entertainement -- the inconsequential thing we supposedly produce to forget about the real world, for a while only.
2 comments:
I love the sentiment in your post. I find it funny that you, Thomas Wharton, and I are all apparently going on tangents about the importance of story and self and the boundaries thereof. It's kind of funny how ideas will get lodged in your head and spread from person to person. In my class with Thomas Wharton the other day someone asked why we study stories and whether we read too much into them. I found it frustratingly hard to answer that question. It wasn't that I didn't have an answer, it's just that I couldn't condense the vast importance stories have for me into a handful of sentences. I guess it's strange that the things you make up can control you and influence you so greatly, but at the same time it's really something wonderful, no?
Amen!
I'm glad you feel the same about stories.
And I know what you mean about not finding a brief answer. In the first place I actually wrote quite a long post about stories, and while I was concluding it, the page disappeared. So I had to rewrite it, and it came out much shorter than the original one. Maybe if the posts had kept on disappearing, I would have been able to say what I have to say about stories in one sentence only!
Oddly there are two things that have been constantly in my mind lately: stories, and God. So my next post will probably be about God... which still has to do with stories in a way.
Post a Comment