The Mystery Feast: Thoughts on Storytelling

We want to travel the untravelled road. We should learn to tell untold stories; stories that wander off the high road; stories like roads untaken. This is the only cure for the despair that all the stories have been told, that there are no new stories under the sun. All the high road stories have been told, but not the hidden roads stories that lea

As the world gets more confused, storytellers should become more centred. What we need in our age are not more specialists, experts, spin-doctors. What we need are people deeply rooted in the traditions of their art, but who are also at ease in the contemporary world.

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

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.

It could be said that imagination is the proto-reality. A people can only create what they can imagine. If in some mysterious way we fall short of the ancients, it may be because we have long ceased to cultivate, to the highest degree, the fruits of the imagination, of the spirit. That despairing cry from the bible should always haunt us. ‘For lack

Our age is lost in sensational tales. Without genuine mystery, the mystery of art, a story will not linger in the imagination.

A story exists in language, but lives in the imagination, in the memory. When does a story live? It lives only when it is read or heard. A story is part telling, part hearing. Part writing, part reading. It dwells in the ambiguous place between the teller and the hearer, between the writer and the reader. The greatest storytellers understand this m

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