도리스 레싱

지난 주에 있었던 올 노벨 문학상 수상자 도리스 레싱의 수상 연설문을 오늘 보왔다.

90년 나이 때문에 몸이 불편해서인지 수상식장에 직접 나타나지는 못했고 그녀의 수상 연설문은 대신 낭독하였다.   그녀가 통탄한 대로 요사이 젊은이들은 책을 읽지 않는다는 것이다.  그녀가 예를 드는 것과 같이 요사이는 보통사람이라도 책 읽기는 커녕 하루종일 블로그에 빠지는 경유도 많아 도대체 책을 읽지 않는다는 것인데 위대한 전통으로 내려오는 것은 책을 읽지 않으면 위대한 작가가 태어날 수가 없다는 것을 자기 고향인 아프리카 짐바브웨 인도 그리고 런던 학교 학생의 예를 통한 자기 경험으로 길게 설명하고 있다. 책을 읽지 않으면 문학도 죽고 작가도 나올 수가 없다고 그녀는 말한다.  

[블로깅하는] This time would be better spent reading books.  Lessing ended by predicting a culture that doesn't value reading cannot produce great writers.    

연설문 낭독 시간은 38분.   

======== 연설문 일부분 카피임.

...

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.

What has happened to us is an amazing invention, computers and the internet and TV, a revolution. This is not the first revolution we, the human race, has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, changed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc…..

 

We think of the old adage, "Reading maketh a full man" – and forgetting about jokes to do with over-eating – reading makes a woman and a man full of information, of history, of all kinds of knowledge.

….

Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books…..

In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a close connection with libraries, books, the Tradition…..

Writers are often asked, How do you write? With a processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand? But the essential question is, "Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration.

If this writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn.

When writers talk to each other, what they ask each other is always to do with this space, this other time. "Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?"….

 

Ask any modern storyteller, and they will say there is always a moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call inspiration and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race, fire, ice and the great winds that shaped us and our world.

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, the storyteller, 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, what we are at our best, when we are our most creative.