On Aug 12, 2012, at 7:07 PM, Michael Brady wrote: > By contrast, the New Testament parables are the polar opposite, the merest > sketches of a narrative with barely the sense of character, and thus are the > more memorable. Similarly, Athenian tragedies consisted of two or three actors > with masks and a chorus of commenators; the plays were more declaimed stories > with homilies than enacted narratives.
The "characters" in Aesop's fables are comparable. They are for children. This is true of all "creative" writing where the thing was written to convey a lesson. By me, such stories, "peopled" by crudely whittled wooden pawns, are always unsatisfying. Note: though you'll notice occasional productions of plays from centuries ago, you never see any of the Athenian tragedies. They are3 very hard for the modern sensibility to tolerate. Creative works today -- for film, stage, or print -- are the products of would-be alchemists employing memory, imagination and sensibility. Memory and imagination abound, in countless people. The rarest of those three qualities is sensibility.
