Among the casualties of the pace that now passes for everyday life is the craft of telling a story. Information has become a burden, not a refuge, in cultures dominated by TV, radio, CDs, pagers, newspapers, email, cell phones, VCRs, answering machines and junk mail. Fading rapidly are the days when the spoken word satisfied a yearning for insights into whatever there was to know about the world, where words carefully chosen and artfully expressed carried us beyond the mundane demands of getting through another day.
One night recently, in a restless fit of boredom, I took a long walk, winding up in a pub some miles from the corner of Dublin I now call home. Hidden away in a cul-de-sac in what's now suburban Dublin, it is one of those places you wouldn't know was there unless you knew it was there.
Quiet corner
Not knowing a soul, I took my Guinness to a quiet corner of an oak-panelled room beyond the bar, staring into a fireplace that hadn't been lit. The conversations around me were someone else's, and I listened only with detached interest until a stranger took note of my daze. He asked if I had heard about the plan to celebrate the dawn of the next millennium by planting a row of trees along the Greenwich meridian from the North Pole to Antarctica, through Europe and North Africa and whatever other land forms might support the notion. I hadn't, of course, so Jimmy, as he called himself, was eager to oblige. A glorious plan, it was, he said, laying it out in fine detail, the facts salted with his own approving opinions.
"Have you been to the US?" I asked 20 minutes later, my first chance to speak.
He had, he said, to some place in Florida, where on Collins Avenue he had experienced a corned beef sandwich the likes of which was not to be found in Dublin. Two slices of bread there were, like any sandwich, mind you, but 10 slices of corned beef. "Could you imagine?" he asked. "Ten slices."
"And what did you do in Florida?" I asked, the tale of the sandwich having run its course.
"Died," said he.
Over the next 40 minutes, he unravelled in carefully paced detail his tale of being swept out into the Atlantic by a rip tide. He wouldn't be sitting here now drinking this pint had it not been for The Whistle.
Three-toned whistle
"When I was a boy, I was the King of the Kids," he said. "Didn't want to be, but was, and I had this whistle that I always used in calling me mates, me gang."
His three-toned whistle shrieked through the pub, bringing the cacophony of the barroom buzz to an uncomfortable, momentary silence.
"That's the whistle that saved my life."
Two hundred yards or more, he was, into the surf, going under for the last time. Every wave, each one higher than the last, took him further out. Gasping for air, seeing his wife dozing on the beach, seeing the dear woman for perhaps for the last time, he had the wits about him to use The Whistle.
The next wave took him under, but coming up once again he saw her in a panic on the beach. Down he went again, perhaps forever, amazing himself when he bobbed to the surface once again, coughing and sputtering. In the distance he could see a man on the beach, kicking off his sneakers, heading into the surf. After him.
"They told me later there were four of them came to my rescue," he said. "I was unconscious when they got me to shore, or I would have given them £100 apiece, or whatever they required, for saving me life. They told my Doreen, who was hysterical with worry, that it happens all the time."
The story lingered unspoken for a minute, maybe more. Jimmy took a long drink of his stout and finally gestured to me. "Yourself?" he asked. "Have you ever nearly died?"
"Yes," I said. "I was kicked in the chest by a horse. Had I been kicked in the head, I would have been killed."
We looked at one another blankly through an awkward silence. My tale of near death had taken 22 words, told in perhaps 14 seconds in not more than a single breath. The efficiency in the telling told it all, and none of it. Here I was, in the company of a master storyteller, a skilled practitioner of a dying art, a stranger gracious enough to offer another stranger a chance to have a go at laying out a yarn of his own. And what did I do? I blew it.
The makings were there, but I had opted for economy, for cutting to the chase, for getting to the punch line, forgoing the opportunity to weave a tale like a tapestry instead of blurting it out like the evening news. Jimmy was clearly disappointed, though I suspect not surprised. I was, after all, American.
Grand tale
I left soon after, thinking as I wandered back through the mist how it could have been a grand tale, embellished or not: the spotted beast snorting and bucking, me flying backward from the force of the blow, collapsing in the hot August dust, dazed and gasping, blood oozing from my chest, turning my white shirt pink . . .
Whatever magic might have been found in the tale had been usurped in 22 mechanically chosen words - magic stolen by a culture where processing messages has become a matter of psychic economy.
"It was a hot afternoon in August, Jimmy, I recall it clearly," I should have told him. "The clouds were glorious, I remember, beginning to gather as they were above the timber, and just barely a scent of rain . . ."