On Not Winning the Nobel Prize(Excerpt)By Doris LessingWe have a treasure-house of literature, going back to the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. It is all there. This wealth of literature, to be discovered again and again by whoever is lucky enough to come upon it. A treasure. Suppose it did not exist. How impoverished, how empty we would be.We own a legacy of languages, poems, histories, and it is not one that will ever be exhausted. It is there, always.We have a bequest of stories, tales from the old storytellers, some of whose names we know, but some not The storytellers go back and back, to a clearing in the forest where a great fire burns, and the old shamans dance and sing, for our heritage of stories began in fire, magic, the spirit world. And that is where it is held, today.The storyteller is deep inside every one of us. The story-maker always with us. Let us suppose our world is ravaged 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 shapes 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, which represents us at our best, and at our most creative.