Tea at Trianon: Is Storytelling a Dying Art?

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, August 13, 2011

Is Storytelling a Dying Art?

Sometimes I wonder. So does Barbara Nicolosi, who says:

What are the elements of a good story? There are many ways to answer this question. We could say with the ancient Greeks that a good story has something for the mind (logos), something for the heart (pathos) and something for the imagination (ethos). We could speak of a story in a moral sense as something that communicates a worthy truth in a way that elicits compunction. Or we could speak of it using the work of the original populist storyteller, Aesop, as a meter. His stories have lasted thousands of years because they are very economical in terms of language and events, are completely unified by necessity, have high stakes, ironic consequences and are sprinkled with creativity and humor. (Read entire article.)