Storytelling is one form of art that transcends medium. Whether in books, ballads, plays, or movies – even in sculptures, photographs or paintings – someone is telling a story. Someone is talking of life. Not Life on a grand scale but life in bits and pieces; seemingly mundane moments that give us glimpses of a bigger picture. Fleeting and ephemeral, once captured by an artist they are immortalized and frozen in time, lending themselves to be shared with other lives as well.
While different stories have vastly different scopes, the time it takes to tell a story somehow falls within a relatively narrow range. Most books have a few hundred pages and most movies last a few hours, but the stories they tell could either cover decades of world history – or a single eventful night in the lives of two people. And yet a beautifully told story is never a page too long, never a minute too short. It’s just as it should be.
Since storytelling time is limited, the story has to be compromised between breadth and depth. Naturally, epic tales cannot get too much into the individual lives of the characters, just as love stories seldom wander far beyond the interaction of a few people. But the storyteller somehow manages to piece the two together in perfect balance of breadth and depth, the former a background of the latter. And while not every second of the story can be told, the storyteller speeds up time and slows it down at just the right moments so that precious minutes are neither wasted nor skimped.
Imagine telling the story of a certain civilization and how it came about. If one were not to miss out a tiny detail, the story could not be finished within the listener’s lifetime, and so the trick is to secure only the salient points. On the other hand, a story that takes place within a shorter time than it takes to read it has to have something really interesting to sustain the reader’s attention. If every single moment, every spoken word is worthy of mention, telling the story will take just as long as the story itself. Now put every deep emotion, every unspoken thought, every subtle gesture, and there you have a story bigger than how it would have been in real life.
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This article was originally published at innerminds.wordpress.com. I re-posted it here to encourage other writers and storytellers to contribute to the FF blog, which seems to be having fewer new articles lately. In the FF Facebook Group, Ryan has been posting mostly articles from Friendly Atheist instead, so please write up guys. 🙂
The 1st show of the new series, broadcast on Saturday, featured a kissogram, a naked Doctor and a “sexed up” Tardis.Throughout the unique 65-minute episode, The Eleventh Hour, in which Physician Who had 20 minutes to save Earth from aliens recognized as the Atraxi, his new companion, Amy Pond, was revealed as a kissogram dressed in a skimpy policeman’s outfit, complete with mini-skirt and handcuffs. In 1 scene, Amy, played by the actress Karen Gillan, told the Dr that her kissogram repertoire also included nuns and nurses’ outfits. Come across out a lot more at Sci Fi Fan.
I've always wanted to write about the negative aspects of being a freethinker versus being religious, especially in this country where religion brings you closer to your families and freethinking makes you the odd one out (and the subject of many unnecessary concerns). Freethinking means intelligence, right? But does intelligence really bring you happiness? Religion means fantasy – but does it prevent happiness? (The contrary, I would think.) All in all, what everyone really wants in life is to be happy, right? So how does freethinking and religion affect that? What weight does the freethinking kind of intelligence and wisdom have over the ignorant bliss of religion? Okay, I'm babbling, but this is the gist of it, and hopefully I'll be able to write the article someday.
er, no, not the "gist" – i meant "premise", not "gist". lol
We happen to have a forum thread on happiness vs. knowledge:
http://www.filipino-freethinkers-22d5b3.ingress-earth.easywp.com/forum/viewtop…
yeah, but now, it's about sex. but thanks for the link 🙂
i'm not really talking about happiness vs knowledge, but more like knowledge vs religion with regards to happiness. it doesn't matter. i probably won't write the article anyway ^_^;
Why not? The FF and our readers would really appreciate more articles from you, so please write. 🙂
I would really appreciate more articles from me hehehe but I would probably end up with another poem rather than an essay ^_^; Thanks for the encouragement.
Poems will do. We have a poetry section. 🙂
Thanks for posting this, Jong. I share Hemant's (Friendly Atheist) posts because those are the kinds of articles I'd like to read on our website — simple, friendly, and consistent. Hopefully someday we'll get more articles like those. And may your post here bring us a step closer 🙂
I'm trying my best to come up with a nice paper (essay, etc), but unfortunately though, my writing skills are mediocre, and I am very lazy.
How about joining the forum to exercise your writing, thinking, and debating skills? You can post interesting topics or issues with just a few sentences there, and perhaps later on you could come up with a whole article. 🙂
I have my very own personal blog, and I can see myself improving — I hope I am. 🙂 Will participate in forum discussions after I study more about atheism and stuff (fallacies, etc). Thank you for the advice though. 🙂
Ps. Nice article, very nice.
and oh, I clicked the 'vote' button accidentally. I don't know what that thing is for. 😀
In response to the article above, as this is only my second time to post comment on this board, allow me to share this story. Btw, am not a member of this group. Thanks.
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My friend asked why I, the prayerful 'altar boy', became an atheist.
Uhm… atheist I am not. Well… almost not.
I'm no Whitney Brown who gave us this soundbyte: "I’m not an atheist. How can you not believe in something that does not exist?" Uhm… how's that again?
I'm agnostic… really. Richard Dawkins, one of the most notable militant atheists today, considers himself a 6.9 agnostic (or atheist, depending on which end of the numbered onion thread that connects two extremes of opposite certainty you choose to hang on to), with "7," let's say, as representative of the strong uncompromising atheist. Professor Dawkins humbly puts himself in that category for the humble reason that he's a scientist. What science is and what a scientist does, feel free to google.
I'm nowhere near Dawkins' 6.9, although "69" conforms with uncompromising sexuality to which my sexth sense is also nowhere near. Brangelina, the couple, are agnostics/atheists, so is Daniel Radcliffe of the "Harry Potter" fame. (Dang! Why do I need to name-drop?)
Why I became not a "Brod Pitt" but instead a "Don't Taser Me, Bro… Prrrtt" is a long story that I could summarily trace back to the old old angelic rituals of Angelus days.
Anyone heard of "angelus"?
Well, it's when dusk slowly fell, and hi-fi radio sound went like this: Dong!… Dong!… Dong!… Ga…bi.. ng… lagim…. Oops! I mean: "Takipsilim na muli… ganap na ika-anim ng gabi… oras ng pagmumuni-muni… blah blah blah…."
Surviving listeners and fans of the late radio announcer Johnny "Wow-wow" de Leon of the old DZXL can fill in the blanks. But I must confess that DeLeon's hi-fi angelus sound of the Angelus hour creeped into my toddler bones and nerves – it was like the "Twilight Zone."
For the little boy that I was during Johnny's wowowees, Angelus was a wall in our house adorned by crucifixes, icons, statues and portraits of saints that 6 children plus a mother faced, all of us on our knees, with memorized rosary script that we murmurred in unison. No adlibs and alibis allowed, or you'd get beat. Then teased.
Unaware that I was learning not to like the wall and all, the church to me became an extension of the wall, literally perhaps, as the small village chapel was no more than a hundred steps away from the capizeed frontwindow of our house. So you see, if I was late for Sunday mass or refused to proceed for childish reasons such as fever and swollen tonsils, or missed one unintentionally, which were rather rare, father was quick to brand me a mason, a moro, a komunista, a gusto-mo-bang-mapunta-sa-Lulumboy? (do you want to end up in Lulumboy?) — lost as to who or what "Lulumboy" was. Oh, the dad might have figuratively or colloquially referred to the Boystown, a juvenile rehab located somewhere in, uhm… until now I can't figure where.
The kind of verbal scares and insults (not including yet the harsh physical beatings) that made the little boy downright confused and subconsciously believed that he was bad — and maybe as "bad" as a good mason, a prayerful moro, or a productive komunista, while tearfully and painfully listening to the angry gospel(s) according to his saintly child-beating father — a father, who, like most fire-breathing priests and pastors, make their listeners miserable by creating in them a sense of self-loathing and inordinate fear.
Lucky enough I wasn't named "Lulumboy."
Catholic grade school wasn't Lulumboy, alright, yet it was there that I got to swallow the teaching that, we, and even a newborn baby is steeped in original sin, and thus deserve to burn in hell. Eventually, street-honed adolescence and youthful activism made me the wavering believer who coldly despised the wall and churchbell klengs and bangs but occassionally and quietly recited the rosary mysteries and other prayers anyways, that, looking back, were done impulsively out of stress, tension, nervousness and outriight fear.
I must admit that the rosary and some other Catholic rituals, in no small way, helped calm me down. Ala tranquilizers they served to relatively clear the confusion in my head, the pounding on my chest, the sweating of my cheeks — momentarily at best. But the tension and fear remained. From what, I had no clear idea.
Until, by some clicks of the mouse, I came across Mother Theresa's Crisis of Faith, then read Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and had a clear grasp of what the stress, tension, nervousness and fear was all about.
What tranquilizer? I asked, smiling, while re-playing this classic video of funnyman George Carlin: "Religion is Bullshit".