man this has been said before by cleverer folks than me, but sometimes you have to sit down and let the sheer size and age of the storytelling tradition just completely overwhelm you, ja feel?
like– think for a second about how mind-bogglingly incredible it is that we know who osiris is? that somebody just made him up one day, and told stories about him to their kids, and literally thousands and thousands of years later we are still able to go “there was a god whose brother cut him into pieces”, it’s so arbitrary, it’s so incredible
that in talking about scheherazade and her husband, you are doing something that someone in every single generation has done since it was written– you are telling stories that have lasted an impossible amount of time
can you conceive of telling a story, and then traveling into the future and hearing that same story told– with alterations, and through media that you could not possibly conceive of, but your story– in the year 3214?
the fact that we! as a species! have been telling the same damn stories for so long– the fact that we’ve seen homer’s troy and chaucer’s troy and shakespeare’s troy and troy with fucking brad pitt because we never fucking stop telling stories! never ever ever!
we never stop caring about stories, or returning to the same stories, or putting our own spins on stories. we never stop talking about the characters as if they were real, or asking what happened next, or asking to hear it again.
generation after generation, they never ever ever stop mattering to us.
Aboriginal Australians have passed down, though their tradition of oral storytelling, information about the changing sea levels around the Australian coast. These stories are scientifically accurate over at least 10,000 years. Aboriginal people have stories of their ancestors living where the Great Barrier Reef now stands. The GBR has existed in its current form for 8,000 years.
Never underestimate the power of storytelling.
http://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-preserve-history-of-a-rise-in-sea-level-36010
Another item for this feast: 23 words that have been in use for about 15,000 years
And Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s Women’s Work, the first 20,000 years gives me the same vast sense of wonder and awe that OP expresses so well
Published
tora42's nonsensne 