On the Storyteller, by Doris Lessing

From her great Nobel Prize speech:

Ask any modern storyteller and they will say there is always a
moment when they are touched with fire, with what we like to call
inspiration, and this goes back and back to the beginning of our race,
to fire and ice and the great winds that shaped us and our world.

The
storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always
with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors
that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through
our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for
it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good
and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn,
hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the
myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at
our most creative.

This is the human hope: that somehow we will make sense of it all, even our disasters.