from Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller" in Illuminations
If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places--the activities that are intimately associated with boredom [artisanal forms of labor]--are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost when the stories are no longer retained. It is lost because there is no more weaving and spinning to go on while they are being listened to. The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of his work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself. This, then, is the nature of the web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled. This is how today it is becoming unraveled at all ends after being woven thousands of years ago in the ambiance of the oldest forms of craftsmanship.
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5 comments:
There is rarely a day when the title of that post doesn't flash through my mind. I like thinking about that line by itself--a way of seeing boredom, often so gnawing and unbearable, as absolutely vital, the wellspring of creativity itself. In the sublime hope of the egg, you can relax.
As much as I quote that line to myself, I usually forget how much Benjamin grounds it in a critique of modernity. I also forget how he rolls off one jaw-dropping trope after the other, weaving together web and basket even as civilization's fabric of listening, work, stillness, and repetition unravel.
The man had a hard-on for rapunzel narratives. How can one say modernity sows rotten crops of cacophony in the all but listless non-listening ears of the rabble? Storytelling hasn't been lost, it's been digitized.
You have missed the point so totally that it is hard to even know how to respond to your comment.
Benjamin is talking about the act of telling stories rather than, as you imply, the quality of narratives and creativity modern v. pre-modern. Don't you see how your last sentence completely affirms the very point he's getting at?
I disagree.
Well, his last sentence is clearly pejorative regarding the mutative properties of modernity. The old-timey practice of storytelling has been altered not unwoven.
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