The Art of Narrative

We engage in this human activity of telling nearly every day at some level. Nourating is an art, like poetry making or painting, because it is there in every child's mind waiting to be discovered. This amazing gift with which normal children are born is allowed to lie fallow in their education. Bobby will come home with a heroic narrative of a fight he has seen between Duke and a dog in the street. It is wonderful but so ingrained as our contempt for children that we see nothing in this but Bobby's foolish childish way.