The Circle

Long before anyone wrote a story down, there was a fire in a cave in southern Africa.

At night, a small band of people gathered around it.

Beyond the entrance was darkness.

Inside, the fire threw light against the stone.

A hunter passed between the flames and the wall carrying the horns of an antelope, and suddenly a great horned creature appeared above them.

A woman lifted her hands and made a bird.

The children discovered that with two fingers they could make the head of a small animal. With an arm, a snake.

They laughed as their creatures chased one another across the rock.

Perhaps someone noticed that if you moved closer to the fire, you became a giant.

Perhaps someone else discovered that a frightening animal could be made less frightening by giving it a ridiculous voice.

We don’t know.

We cannot know.

But we know that people gathered.

And we know that they told stories.

Someone told of the hunt that morning.

Someone remembered a place where water could still be found when the land became dry.

Someone spoke of an animal encountered beyond the ridge.

An elder told a story that had been told to them when they were young.

A child interrupted.

Someone laughed.

Someone disagreed.

And as the fire burned lower, the stories continued.

Look at that circle for a moment.

Not at the story.

At the people listening.

Their faces are illuminated by the same light.

They can see each other react.

A frightening moment draws a child closer to a parent.

A joke moves through the group as laughter.

A silence is shared.

Someone adds something.

Someone remembers something differently.

The story belongs to the person speaking, but somehow, by the end, it belongs to everyone.

This may be one of the oldest things about us.

Long before books.

Long before cities.

Long before nations, religions, theatres, televisions or telephones.

We gathered.

And we told each other stories.

Thousands upon thousands of years passed.

We left the caves.

But we took the stories with us.

We told them around fires and beneath trees. In houses and temples. Around dinner tables and in crowded taverns. Parents told them to children. Travellers carried them across mountains and oceans. Some became songs. Some became paintings. Some became books.

And eventually, we became very good at sending stories across great distances.

A voice could cross an ocean.

A face could appear inside another person’s home.

Then inside a small piece of glass held in the hand.

And something curious happened.

We found ourselves once again sitting in darkness, our faces illuminated by flickering light, watching other humans tell us stories.

It looks strangely familiar.

But something is missing.

The fire is gone.

The circle is gone.

Often, so are the other people.

There may be millions of us watching the same person speak, and yet each of us may be watching alone.

We see the storyteller.

But the storyteller cannot see us.

We laugh, but they do not hear us.

We are moved, but nobody beside us notices.

There is no child interrupting.

No elder adding something they remember.

No glance across the flames.

No hand reaching for another.

No warmth.

Only the light.

Perhaps this is why an evening around a fire can still feel strangely powerful.

Nothing much needs to happen.

Someone puts another piece of wood onto the flames.

Someone begins a story.

Someone else interrupts.

The story wanders.

People laugh.

There are silences that nobody feels the need to fill.

And for a little while, we are doing something humans have done for longer than we can remember.

Not consuming a story.

Sharing one.

There is a difference.

A story on a screen can travel around the world.

It can make us laugh, teach us something, move us deeply. It can introduce us to a human being we might otherwise never have known.

There is wonder in that too.

But perhaps we should remember what surrounded the story before there was a screen.

Other people.

Their faces.

Their voices.

Their interruptions.

Their laughter.

Their silence.

Their warmth.

Because for most of human existence, a story was never only something we heard.

It was somewhere we met.

Tonight, somewhere in southern Africa, a fire will burn.

People will gather around it.

Faces will appear and disappear in the shifting light.

Someone will begin telling a story.

And shadows will move across the ground behind them.

For a little while, nobody will be watching alone.

And perhaps the oldest technology of human connection will begin working again.

Not the fire.

The circle around it.