Stories are entrusted to storytellers by the elders. But these storytellers are not meant to repeat the narrative verbatim; they are expected to understand these stories and, through them, reflect on what the community needs to hear at any given moment. This temporal gathering, both in and around a story, acknowledges the personal subjectivities al... See more

We are, I think, for reasons that are not altogether clear to me, standing sentinel because we are encountering not a treasure in quite the same sense that Arendt suggests here, but something like its distant echo—the rumor of a mode of life we’ve forgotten or been denied.