The Mystery Feast: Thoughts on Storytelling

You cannot be a magician in stories if you are not a magician in life.

Indirection fascinates. Straight roads make the mind fall asleep. But we all love to take hidden paths, roads that bend and curve.

Stories are the infinite seeds that we have brought with us through the millennia of walking the dust of the earth. They are our celestial pods.

The difficulties human beings face, the enigmas of life, will not go away. They will not go away till we are perfected. And we are not going to be perfected for a very long time.

There is a presumption in thinking that we entirely invent our stories. Rather it could be said that the stories come through us, assemble themselves out of the elements of our lives and imagination. We receive and shape them. We cannot be said to originate them. All true storytellers are modest.

In a world of advertisements, obsession with fame, in which the hyped is more valued than the true, the tale of the Emperor's New Clothes gains significant resonance. Most of what we pursue, what we are obsessed with, what confuses and humiliates us, most of what society projects at us, the inflated notions of success, are all Emperor's New Clothes

Stories are not innocent. We should be careful about the stories we listen to. We should be sceptical and critical. We should always ask questions about them and seek to make a distinction in our minds between good and false stories.

In the world of good stories everything is linked by surprise. There only the unpredictable is logical. The laws of the world of stories operate inversely to those of the world we call reality.

The historian deals with the past, but the true storyteller works with the future.

The true danger of stories is that they tend to bypass reason. They can bypass intelligence and go straight to the subconscious. Why else have very intelligent people in the past believed such absurd things about other races?