http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,331488257-114241,00.html
A hunger for books
Last night Doris Lessing, aged 88, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In her acceptance speech she recalls her childhood in Africa and laments that children in Zimbabwe are starving for knowledge, while those in more privileged countries shun reading for the 'inanities' of the internet
["...The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.
That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is - we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?
I think it is that girl and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us. "
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Comments: 11
A couple of years ago, my daughter studied and worked in Namibia. When she was telling me about her trip, she broke down sobbing as she talked about how few books the school had. The entire school which, granted, wouldn't have been very large, had fewer books than we have in our house - by the hundreds.
It's amazing what we take for granted.
BUT
Let's look at the printed word in another way for a moment: the incredible spins of soul-stealing lies that get published all around us...We all know examples.
There are plenty of "junk"storytellers, too - blaring out of TV sets, etc.
So what is the defining value? Just "books"?
Hmmm.
As a writer, I, like so many here, work with a few values. We can all name our guiding few. I use them in non-written storytelling/songwriting/playwrighting as well as in written works - indeed, in all my actions, as well.
Books.
Hmm.
I know what she means, though.
In our library system we place a high, high value on "The Marketplace of Ideas." That includes written materials, but it also includes programs and discussions....patrons can check out music and art as well as printed materials...
Ten unsolicited points from the world's worst connection. Merry whatever you celebrate!
I was recently in Zambia where apparently the situation is not as dire as it is across the river in Zimbabwe; although I couldn't imagine how it could be worst any where! I visited a charter school run by an amazing English woman, where children as young as six walked up to four miles each way to come to school, more often than not on an empty stomach! While school supplies were woefully short, the most jarring sight was that of over 100 blue plastic cups waiting to be filled with a porridge provided but WHO. In many cases this would be the only meal the children would get that day! By the time they were in 4th grade, 40% of them had already lost at least one parent to HIV/AID. And yet they seemed even more hungry for learning than for food. And when that 4th grade class sang for me, a tiny girl surprised all of us (including her teacher) by spontaneously breaking into close harmonies worthy of a young Miriam Makeba. The song these children were singing: Lean on me!!!
I appreciate your sharing your experience and your comments on Doris Lessing.
"...the irrational belief in the goodness of man...becomes something much more than the wobbly basis of idealistic philosophies. It becomes a solid and irridescent truth. This means that goodness becomes a central and tangible part of one's world, which world at first sight seems hard to identify with the modern one of newspaper editors and other bright pessimists, who will tell you that it is, mildly speaking, illogical to applaud the supremacy of good at a time when something called the police state....is trying to turn the globe into five million square miles of terror, stupidity, and barbed wire...But within the emphatically and unshakably illogical world which I am advertising as a home for the spirit, war gods are unreal not because they are conveniently remote in physical space from the reality of the reading lamp and the solidity of a fountain pen, but because I cannot imagine (and that is saying a good deal) such circumstances as might impinge upon the lovely and lovable world which quietly persists, whereas I can very well imagine that my fellow dreamers, thousands of whom roam the earth, keep to these same irrational and divine standards during the darkest and most dazzling hour of physical danger, pain, dust, death."