Storytelling Wins The Day

In this age of lies and equivocations, narcissism and flat out nonsense, we need the storytellers.  Storytellers, in the age of COVID-19, will win the day.

This is a love letter to the journalists, the guardians of truth and story.  Through them we hear the miracles, the losses, the despondency, the desperation.  We go inside the COVID-19 wing in a Bronx hospital.  We hear Governor Cuomo’s pleas for more ventilators.  We hear Trump and Pence’s lies and we hear them confronted by the truth.  And then we see and hear the rage in their reactions to this confrontation, incompetence revealed in their harangues and misinformation campaigns.

A special mention must be made of photo journalists.  They give us the visual story with minimal words and maximum effect.  Those haunting images of empty New York streets, of crowded California beaches with their teeming masses yearning to break free of common sense.  We see through their eyes the front line workers, emergency responders, nurses and doctors struggling to beat this disease one patient at a time.  We see endless car lines at food banks, people driving up to be swabbed, and the slow disintegration of our social fabric at the hands of a microscopic enemy.  They capture it all, often at great expense and personal danger.

However, we cannot forget the storytellers who are novelists, poets, essayists.  They can trace their lineage back to Homer, the blind poet who could recite a thousand lines of an evening around the fire.  We turn to them not for factual truth but emotional truth, for wisdom, for insight, for entertainment.

We need to listen to the stories.  It has never been more imperative.  Stories will remind us of our humanity, of our shared investment in a better world.  Stories of this pandemic will last a thousand years.  We still read Homer.  We still hang on to Virgil’s every word.  We still journey through hell with Dante for the reward of paradise.  Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, David Sedaris—is there ever a complete list?  Doesn’t everyone in the kingdom of readers have his or her own list?

I am reading Albert Camus’s The Plague.  Some people I have told have said that they want to escape any hint of what is happening in our frightened world right now.  I want to sink into it, know as much as possible, revisit accounts of previous plagues and pandemics.  To each his own.

But the storytellers will win the day.  We need to read.  We need to gather around the metaphorical campfire and listen to the storytellers, our life raft in troubled seas.  We need to write our own stories and remember so we, too, can pass on our life and history, our response to dark and difficult times.  Storytelling is a human art; it continues and lives on, long after we have gone down to that last sleep.  In the end, all that remains, is the story.