“Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, to fire and ice and the great winds that shaped us and our world.
The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative”.
*** In the same speech she also asks:
“How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”
Still, beautifully written sentimental speech.
Doris Lessing: Noble prize acceptance speech 2007
Congratulations
Comments 4
I heard her on Front Row tonight. She’s fabulously grumpy but also a bit irritating at times. She clearly hasn’t come across some of the great blogs that are out here.
Posted 10 Dec 2007 at 10:42 pm ¶Sorry me again. I think the juxtaposition of those two quotes is well placed - blogging has democratised the storyteller.
Posted 10 Dec 2007 at 10:43 pm ¶exactly.
I could argue with her here on my blog but realised that it is rather pointless….
I always find it somewhat frustrating that people think about the internet as good or bad.
Treating “the internet” or “web2.0′ and of course the blogosphere as one thing and trying to argue if it’s right or wrong, good or bad is as useless as treating people as good or bad. The web is us. the web is humanity, people, information, knowledge, sex, mass culture, high art, politics, love, hate, bullshit, relationships, truth, lies, communications…..it is everything…..
I feel like i’m singing this song for quite a while now…
Posted 11 Dec 2007 at 8:02 am ¶Yes you’ve hit the nail on the head there - that’s exactly what’s irritating. The web is a mirror of the world and just as varied and wondrous and hideous at the same time depending on where you look. It’s like going to London and judging it by Oxford Street.
Posted 11 Dec 2007 at 9:29 pm ¶Post a Comment