Then and Now
I love reading old stories, myths, and fairy tales. I did when I was younger and it hasn't stopped me now. Going back to beloved compilations of Grimm and Lang, Andersen and Wilde, I stumble across stories that I remembered one way and now experience completely differently. One such passage from Elinor Mordaunt's THE PRINCE AND THE GOOSE GIRL struck me up the head and made it ring:
"Once there was a great Prince who was so great a fighter that no one dared to deny him anything that he asked, and people would give up their houses and lands, their children, and even their own freedom rather than offend him."
Did I even read that when I was a girl? Did I understand the weight behind those words or stop to ponder them or was it just another pretty introduction like "Once Upon A Time"? Could I have understood it when I was too young to vote? When cable TV had just come to be? When the world was a plastic globe atop the teacher's desk and politics were fireworks and marches in Washington D.C.?
Now I think about Benjamin Franklin and the 2000 election. I think of the Orwellian "Patriot Act" and Cory Doctorow's LITTLE BROTHER and M.T. Anderson's FEED and Aldous Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD. I think about local soldiers overseas. I think about China. I think about tyranny. And I think about how all of this came up for me in the first sentence of the first paragraph of a short story written by a British woman long ago and how *THAT* is writing: trickling down through the ages to light a fire in my mind and make me think, make me question, make me care about something that hasn't even started yet.
This is the essence of storytelling. This is where I want to be.
"Once there was a great Prince who was so great a fighter that no one dared to deny him anything that he asked, and people would give up their houses and lands, their children, and even their own freedom rather than offend him."
Did I even read that when I was a girl? Did I understand the weight behind those words or stop to ponder them or was it just another pretty introduction like "Once Upon A Time"? Could I have understood it when I was too young to vote? When cable TV had just come to be? When the world was a plastic globe atop the teacher's desk and politics were fireworks and marches in Washington D.C.?
Now I think about Benjamin Franklin and the 2000 election. I think of the Orwellian "Patriot Act" and Cory Doctorow's LITTLE BROTHER and M.T. Anderson's FEED and Aldous Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD. I think about local soldiers overseas. I think about China. I think about tyranny. And I think about how all of this came up for me in the first sentence of the first paragraph of a short story written by a British woman long ago and how *THAT* is writing: trickling down through the ages to light a fire in my mind and make me think, make me question, make me care about something that hasn't even started yet.
This is the essence of storytelling. This is where I want to be.
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