Out with your stories!

Once upon a time, I was an avid reader of Franz Kafka. Yes, avid. As in, my mother was taking a "culture cluster" course on German and Slavic-speaking writers, and old Fritzy was among them. After she was finished, she threw away the paperback collection of short stories she had so reluctantly read a few of. Well, whatever my Jewish mother who was raised to revile anything that smacked of the darkness of the slums her ancestors escaped or of the the bright light of White Christendom that her ancestors felt banished from (and somewhere betwixt the two she found the Messiah) MUST be worth picking out of the trash and furiously reading at all hours of day and night. And so it was. "Out with your stories!" cried a young man to an old one, shaking him by his coat collar, in one story. Reminds me still of "'Come, tell me what is is you do, and tell me how you live!'/ His answer trickled through my head, like water through a sieve." This is the song the White Knight sang to Alice when she went wandering though the looking-glass, all about an aged man a-sitting on a fence. So the young are desperate for the stories of the old ones, perhaps they think that another's hindsight may give them control of their own uncertain future? That is the hope of course. Or perhaps misery loves company, and a tragic tale of wasted youth could make a present calamity seem less terrible. I would prefer, though, to be less desperate in the asking and to be more generous in the giving; "out with your stories" I demand of myself, and of you, gentle reader. We should all be better tellers, and far better listeners, than we are wont.