Analysis
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The Most Human Art: 10 reasons why we’ll always need good stories
By Scott Russell Sanders, The Georgia Review, September/October 1997
We have been telling stories to one another for a long time, perhaps for as long as we have been using language, and we have been using language, I suspect, for as long as we have been human. In all its guises, from words spoken and written to pictures and musical notes and mathematical symbols, language is our distinguishing gift, our hallmark as a species.
We delight in stories, first of all, because they are a playground for language, an arena for exercising this extraordinary power. The spells and enchantments that figure in so many tales remind us of the ambiguous potency in words, for creating or destroying, for binding or setting free.
Italo Calvino, a wizard of storytelling, described literature as "a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary." Calvino's remark holds true, I believe, not just for the highfalutin' modes we label as literature, but for every effort to make sense of our lives through narrative.
Second, stories create community. They link teller to listeners, and listeners to one another. This is obviously so when speaker and audience share the same space, as humans have done for all but the last few centuries of our million-year history; but it is equally if less obviously so in our literate age, when we encounter more of our stories in solitude, on page or screen. When two people discover they have both read Don
Quixote, they immediately share a piece of history and become thereby less strange to one another.
The strongest bonds are formed by sacred stories, which unite entire peoples. Thus Jews rehearse the events of Passover; Christians tell of a miraculous birth and death and resurrection; Buddhists tell of Gautama
meditating
The Most Human Art: 10 reasons why we’ll always need good stories
By Scott Russell Sanders, The Georgia Review, September/October 1997
We have been telling stories to one another for a long time, perhaps for as long as we have been using language, and we have been using language, I suspect, for as long as we have been human. In all its guises, from words spoken and written to pictures and musical notes and mathematical symbols, language is our distinguishing gift, our hallmark as a species.
We delight in stories, first of all, because they are a playground for language, an arena for exercising this extraordinary power. The spells and enchantments that figure in so many tales remind us of the ambiguous potency in words, for creating or destroying, for binding or setting free.
Italo Calvino, a wizard of storytelling, described literature as "a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary." Calvino's remark holds true, I believe, not just for the highfalutin' modes we label as literature, but for every effort to make sense of our lives through narrative.
Second, stories create community. They link teller to listeners, and listeners to one another. This is obviously so when speaker and audience share the same space, as humans have done for all but the last few centuries of our million-year history; but it is equally if less obviously so in our literate age, when we encounter more of our stories in solitude, on page or screen. When two people discover they have both read Don
Quixote, they immediately share a piece of history and become thereby less strange to one another.
The strongest bonds are formed by sacred stories, which unite entire peoples. Thus Jews rehearse the events of Passover; Christians tell of a miraculous birth and death and resurrection; Buddhists tell of Gautama
meditating