“The Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Religion” by Seán ÓLaoire (Transcript and Video)

In the summer of 1963, in between the end of my junior year in high school and the beginning of my senior year in high school I spent seven months in a little village in West Cork called Cloghroe. Cloghroe is an area in which Gaelic is still the mother tongue. I spent the summer visiting all of the older people in the village and collecting proverbs from them. At the end of the summer I collected 432 proverbs that got published in the school as the little booklet of proverbs. What I learned then was that stories are the archived wisdom of any culture. You want to go to the wisdom of any culture, listen to their stories, their mythology, and if you want to get the the essential distillation of the stories go to the proverbs — these extraordinary one-liners.