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Last Tuesday, a very tightly packed Castro Theatre hosted speaker Neil Gaiman,author of over a hundred short stories and graphic novels, as part of The LongNow Foundation’s series Seminars About Longterm Thinking. In his talk,entitled “How Stories Last”, Gaiman explored the importance of storytelling as ameans of survival in our culture.

While Gaiman is probably best known for The Sandman, a DC Comics series aboutthe ruler of dreams, some might more easily recognize him as the author ofCoraline; adapted in 2009 into an animated movie about an 11-year-old girl whofinds herself trapped in an evil “copy” version of her own world.

Instead of harkening back to characters from his own works to help illustrate ouraddiction to stories, Gaiman drew from conversations with satire novelist DouglasAdams, lessons from his Holocaust surviving grandmother, and the mystique ofthe glass slipper from Cinderella.

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Stories Worth a Thousand Lies: NeilGaimanBY ASHLEY VILLARREAL ON JUN 18, 2015

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The glass slipper in Cinderella was most likely a fur boot

“’Once upon a time’ is code for ‘I am about to lie to you,’” Gaiman half-jokes. “Theact of reading a story or listening to a story is the act of knowing you’re being liedto.” Many tales we remember may have actually had details changed to make themmore interesting and worth remembering. The glass slipper in Cinderella wasmost likely a fur boot, he says, but a sparkly pair of heels sounded better andallowed the story to be retold time and time again.

And stories aren’t just fun to tell at parties—they hold much more power andmeaning than we give them credit for. Many stories we now tell predate us bythousands of years and were made shareable only through the importance weassigned them. In many ways, Gaiman says, stories can be likened to viruses thatsimply use people as vehicles to spread.

“Information in a story is something you can access as real info,” Gaiman alsosays. “You can access it as if you have experienced it—you can use it—and then youcan pass it on.” What we read and remember becomes important to our societybecause we derive lessons from stories over time that can be transferrable to us inour everyday lives.

Even more vital is the potential for escape that stories provide us with. Gaimanrecounts how his grandmother was lucky enough to come across a copy of “GoneWith The Wind”, by Margaret Mitchell, during her Holocaust imprisonment.Having been forbidden books, she spent many of her days recounting what shehad read in secret the night before. This ritual helped bring temporary comfortand distraction to her peers, many of whom did not survive to retell them.

While it seems the written tradition of storytelling is slowly being overpowered byan oral one where the impermanence of the Internet is king, Gaiman promises thestories we continue to collect for future generations will not easily be lost.

“Douglas Adams once told me that books are sharks,” he recalls. “There weresharks back when there were dinosaurs…the reason there are still sharks is thatnothing has turned up that is better at being a shark than a shark is.”

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Listen to Brainpickings audio recording at the Long Now Foundation on June 9th,2015:

Shark photo credit Shutterstock

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