Our readers are cast under the spell of the feed.
Think about it, most curators of content have an audience that will fill up many movie theatres. Perhaps we can liken our reading to sitting in a movie theatre, which in itself has acquired an aura of unfamiliarity nowadays - especially After Pandemic. We engage with texts in a way that is less ‘sacred’, less communal. The act of reading or even listening has been relegated to something that you do in between other things. Our audiences are huddling, not by the warmth and light of a fire, but by the screen. I wonder what the act of storytelling today has retained from this somewhat nostalgic evocation. He sees it as an essential activity, because of its ability to give shelter.
This framing privileges the act to a strata of activity that is akin to farming, or cooking. He places it within the context of social relationships, as an essential link in the chaos of community and individual identity. He ascribes to the act of creation and narrative transference, a kind of magic. Sontag: A measured reflection on possibilities.īerger’s a romantic. A Youtube ‘critic’ describes the conversation very aptly (in the comments section):īerger: A passionate attempt to grasp an essence. The two writers take opposing standpoints while discussing the role of the storyteller in society, and its evolution from primitive times to modern writing. This is how Berger broaches the subject, ‘ To Tell a Story’, at the beginning of a discussion with his contemporary, Susan Sontag. But then, inside the story, there’s another kind of shelter, because what the story narrates and tells is sheltered within the story from oblivion and forgetfulness and daily interference.” So there is this an almost physical sense of shelter where the story represents a kind of habitation, a kind of home. Or the soldier who has come back, who has survived. The shelter, perhaps of the voyager, the traveller who has come, who has lived to tell the story. And somewhere, for me, in the very idea of the story, there is something to do with shelter. Maybe they’re huddled against a wall, maybe they’re around a fire. “If I think of somebody telling a story, I see a group of people huddled together, and around them, a vast space… quite frightening.