Storyteller

Homer…Shakespeare…Twain…Tolkien…every age has its storytellers.

We all make up stories … when we don’t have all the facts, the human tendency is to fill in the blanks with plausible explanation. Most people just don’t ever write them down. Those of us who do take it for granted that other people do the same, we just never see them do it. Same with reading … they read books all the time, same way we do. Really? We never have all the facts.

I had a conversation this afternoon about cultural literacy, with my neighbor’s 16-year-old son. He’s never seen Dr. Strangelove, or read Catcher in the Rye. Not that any of that is unusual, but the fact that the charter high school he attends doesn’t even have a library seems to me irresponsible. His response that you could get “almost anything” as a digital facsimile was not remotely reassuring.

I read on screens, a lot. Too much, really, but the internet has become a go-to, or a source of last resort depending on your perspective. Screens are a conduit for images and information, but they are not books.

Books were the information revolution of the Italian Renaissance, 500 years ago. After the Dark Ages, Europe had survived wars, plagues, political upheavals of all sorts, and then somebody invented the printing press. Which landed some years later at Subiaco, a monastery north of Rome.

Printing found a home in Venice, through the capable hands of Aldus Manutius, who saw the potential in locating ancient manuscripts from the Greeks and Romans, translating into Italian, and printing by the thousands small pocket-sized versions of Classical authors. That resulting dissemination of culture drove the Renaissance.

Thou art earnestly requested to state thy business briefly, and to take thy departure promptly. For this is a place of work. (sign over the door of Aldus Manutius’ workshop, Venice, early 1500's)