Some books we find ourselves, while others find us through other people…

One of the good reads of this summer came to me precisely that way: a collection of essays by Walter Benjamin, a gift from a friend. Among them, the one that made me stop and reflect was The Storyteller.
Anyone who has read The Storyteller knows that Benjamin is not concerned merely with the art of storytelling. Behind the fading figure of the storyteller, Benjamin sees something deeper: the weakening of our ability to turn what we live through into experience. Yet life and experience are not quite the same thing. Much can happen to us without ever truly becoming part of us. For an event to acquire meaning, it often needs to pass through the filters of time, travel into memory, and change and transform along with us. Only then can we perhaps have something to tell, beyond what we have simply lived through or experienced.

Benjamin’s storyteller is someone who understands this phenomenon of distance and time very well.
He does not pass on an event as something untouched; he tells it only after time has left its mark upon it. That is why a story does not rush to explain itself. It can leave gaps, preserve nuances of silence, and refrain from serving the listener a completely ready-made meaning.

According to Benjamin: “A good story does not necessarily end where the storyteller’s words end.”
Benjamin illustrates this through Herodotus’s story of Psammenitus. The Egyptian king does not weep when he sees his children being humiliated, but bursts into tears when he notices an old servant among the prisoners. Herodotus does not tell us why…

Centuries later, the story continues to make us reflect precisely because the explanation is missing. Every reader can return to it with a different question. There is something deeply human here: not every truth becomes clearer when it is explained. Some truths need to remain slightly open in order to continue speaking to us.

It is precisely in this context that Benjamin places information in contrast with storytelling. Information derives its value from novelty; it needs to tell us what happened, and it needs to do so as quickly as possible.

Storytelling does not live according to the same sense of time. A story can wait. It can return many years later and tell us something we were not able to understand the first time—not because the story has changed, but because we have changed…

Perhaps this is exactly why The Storyteller feels so close to me today, so relevant. We live in a time when we know so much about what is happening, yet rarely have the time to stop and remain with what we know. On the same screen, we can scroll past live footage from a war, a global political crisis, someone’s holiday photograph, an advertisement for a waist-trimming corset, or something that makes us laugh. Each demands our attention for a moment and immediately gives way to the next…

Social media has turned this kind of rhythm into a habit. What appears before us is not necessarily arranged according to its importance, but according to the likelihood that it will “keep us hooked” a little longer, there behind the screen.

The algorithm does not know memory in the human sense of the word; it needs the continuity of a preference.
One thing must make way for another. And so a paradox emerges: we have the ability to preserve almost everything and yet, somehow, fewer and fewer things seem to stay with us, or within us, for very long…
Because preserving is not the same as remembering.

Human memory is something else: it chooses, forgets, connects, alters. It can preserve an insignificant detail for a lifetime and effortlessly allow a major event to fade.

Without being a copy of the past, memory is the very way in which the past continues to live within our present.
Even the way we choose to tell our own stories has become more complicated today, since we can share a fragment, a moment, while we are still living it. We photograph it, find a caption, and voilà, publish it.
But sometimes what we have lived through only crystallizes once it has passed.

A journey may acquire meaning after we have returned, a love after it has ended, a loss after we have learned to live with the absence.

Between an event and its meaning there is a stretch of time that neither technology nor our desire can shorten. Perhaps it is there, in that invisible time, that what Benjamin calls experience is born.

And every story requires a listener. This is perhaps the least visible, but most human, aspect of Benjamin’s thought.

Today, each of us can reach an audience, with followers, comments, reactions, people who see us… Yes, people who see us… But being seen and being heard are often confused, as though they were the same thing…

Listening requires someone to stay, not simply to react. It requires silence, but not the kind that arises from an absence of words. It requires precisely the kind of silence that leaves room for another person’s words…

Perhaps this is why a psychotherapy practice can be considered one of the few places today where storytelling still finds time…

A person enters with their own story, their own narrative, but not always knowing what exactly they are telling. By speaking, returning to the same events, falling silent at one point and remembering something else at another, they begin to hear their own stories differently.

The psychotherapist does not write the story for them, nor does he close off its meaning. He listens long enough, carefully enough, making it possible for the person to hear themselves…

There is something significant in the fact that this need has become so strong precisely today: we can speak to hundreds or thousands of people at once and still need, and seek out, even a single person who will listen to us, who will truly listen.

Perhaps because, after multiplying the ways in which we communicate, we have come to understand that words do not gain weight simply because they have been spoken.

They need to find a place where they can arrive.

And so The Storyteller does not seem to me like a lament for a world that no longer exists. Benjamin poses a question that our age has only made sharper:

What becomes of the human being when everything around them moves faster than their ability to make sense of it?

We can tell everything, photograph everything, preserve almost everything. But none of these things is enough to turn a life into a story.

For that, we still need what cannot be accelerated: time to understand, memory to hold on to it, and the presence of someone else who knows how to listen…