Since the moral dimension of literature is already a conversational topic today, I wanted to share this video of Isabelle Allende‘s talk at last year’s TED conference. It’s 18 minutes, so rather than watch it at work, you may want to download the video from the TED site for later viewing. The first six minutes or so is a long, audience-pleasing story about her role as an Olympic torchbearer, but then she segues to a more substantial discussion of social justice and feminism punctuated by stories of actual women which, I thought upon listening, underscored one of the key messages in Doris Lessing‘s Nobel acceptance speech about the power of storytelling and the feedback loop between stories and societies. Allende alludes to this about halfway through her speech:
“The protagonists of my novel are strong and passionate women… I don’t make them up. There’s no need for that. I look around and I see them everywhere.”