On Language

The man, Sorren, had an unusual life.  He was a man who could communicate with the world only through his voice and his ears, until the day when his benefactor gave him the gift of reading and writing.  While we all have to attain these skills, we mostly accomplish them at a very young age and can really never remember a time when it was not so.  Sorren could remember this time.  What must that time have been like?  To my way of thinking this is what all storytelling tries to do, to imagine a time which never was.  Sometimes we are fortunate to have not lived in those times.  But there is also a part of us which yearns for those elusive and mysterious experiences.  How would we have handled the threats and promises of the day?  Would we have been worthy to have our lives recorded?  And when we eventually learned to read would we have realized that the world had just changed, that our voice was now more than just a form of communication and of song, that our voice was not a mechanism for utility but rather a window to our soul?