Among the oldest symbolic systems in the world are those organized around the content and the rules of language. The first narrative stories telling of real or imaginary events, the myths and campfire tales of our ancestors, extended dramatically the range of human experience through imagination. The rhyme and meter of poetry created patterns of order that must have seemed miraculous to people who had yet scarcely learned to improve on the precarious order of nature. And when the discovery of writing made it possible to preserve memory outside the fragile brain, the domain of the word became
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