This Wonderful Thing

Lately, I spend a lot of time listening to people tell stories. I started out by reading stuff from Brevity, but a lot of it felt too adorned and stylized. I'm in the mood for simple and dense. Transformative moments explained by the people who had them. Moments that don't take place in coffee shops and aren't about unrequited love. I've had that; take me somewhere else.

Almost by accident, I found a website for The Moth, a venue in New York City where people get up on stage and tell true ten-minute stories on a particular theme, without reference notes.

There's something to live recordings; there's something more intimate to hearing than seeing. Maybe I know too much about how pictures are made - how much glass an image has to go through. Maybe I feel safer when I am blindfolded, and am allowed to let someone else worry for me. I can tell when a speaker is fighting down tears. I can guess a gesture from a breathing change. I can listen.

It's a gift to be talked to like this. It's dangerous too, because I don't want to stop listening. I don't know the last time somebody talked to me about something that mattered to them, for no other reason than to tell the story. Probably it was James.

Since I'm out of Moth, I've moved on to This American Life archives.