Orts #750

Every morning brings us the news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information.

     — Walter Benjamin, in an essay, The Storyteller (1936), quoted in The Telling Room, by Michael Paterniti (2013)

. . . [In] 2003, NASA had programmed the Hubble telescope to photograph what appeared from Earth as a thumbnail of empty black sky. But what emerged when four hundred images were superimposed as “The Hubble Ultra Deep Field” astonished even the astronomers: Out of that nothing patch came ten thousand galaxies and a thousand trillion stars just like our sun.

   — a footnote in The Telling Room

. . . but eventually it boiled down to a simple question: What does one plus one equal?

   Mark said two. Obviously.

   One plus one equals one, Sara said.

   Mak was adamant. It was an inviolable truth: One plus one equals two!

   Pfffft, said Sara. One man plus one woman equals one child. One family plus another equals a village. One point of view plus another might equal consensus.

    — The Telling Room