Stories Telling

We are both storytellers. Lying on our backs, we look up at the night sky. This is where stories began, under the aegis of that multitude of stars which at night filch certitudes and sometimes return them as faith. Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers. Tracing an imaginary line between a cluster of stars gave them an image and an identity. The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surround them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.

John Berger

[btw, if you’re interested in getting the entire text of Berger’s And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos in regimented daily doses via email, sign up here. Not a bad way to get a bit of refreshing thought in the clutter of junk and business.]

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