The Storyteller

Mario Vargas Llosa

Most likely not. The sort of decision arrived at by saints and madmen is not revealed to others. It is forged little by little, in the folds of the spirit, tangential to reason, shielded from indiscreet eyes, not seeking the approval of others--who would never grant it--until it is at last put into practice. I imagine in the process--the conceiving of a project and its ripening into action--the saint, visionary, or the madman isolates himself more and more, walling himself up in solitude, safe from the intrusion of others.

And before the moon could escape, she'd rubbed his face with the shit she'd just shat.

Talking the way a storyteller talks means being able to feel and live in the very heart of that culture, means having penetrated its essence, reached the marrow of its history and mythology, given body to its taboos, images, ancestral desires, and terrors. It means being, in the most profound way possible, a rooted Machiguenga, one of that ancient lineage who--in the period in which this Firenze, where I am writing, produced its dazzling effervescence of ideas, paintings, buildings, crimes, and intrigues--roamed the forests of my country, bringing and bearing away those tales, lies, fictions, gossip, and jokes that make a community of that people of scattered beings, keeping alive among them the feeling of oneness, of constituting something fraternal and solid.

I was reminded of Sixpence and the Moon a little when I read this. It's the story of a man who believes what so many others simply espouse. It's the story of a life that takes seriously the things it reads and talks of and wonders about.
Since words are so easy to use and so pleasant to slosh about many people do a good deal more using and sloshing than is good for them. Words are also powerful and sometimes they can do things to you that you don't reckon on. There is a disconnect in all the world about us, especially our culture, of using words--and they are all powerful--and failing to align our realities with those words. We say we love this thing or we believe in that ideal and in moments or sometimes the same breath move with our hands against the very object of our belief. How dare we.
But in the Storyteller there is a reverence for words and their use. What else would we expect from a culture held together by words alone?
Think for a second though and wonder if we are any different.