Resident Tiller of the Soil

Are you the "resident tiller of the soil" or "the trading seaman?"

In Walter Benjamin's "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov", the author examines these two groups.

Experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which
all storytellers have drawn. And among those who have written down the tales, it
is the great ones whose written version differs least from the speech of the
many nameless storytellers. Incidentally, among the last named there are two
groups which, to be sure, overlap in many ways. And the figure of the
storyteller gets its full corporeality only for the one who can picture them
both. “When someone goes on a trip, he has something to tell about,” goes
the German saying, and people imagine the storyteller as someone who has come
from afar. But they enjoy no less listening to the man who has stayed at home,
making an honest living, and who knows the local tales and traditions. If one
wants to picture these two groups through their archaic representatives, one is
embodied in the resident tiller of the soil, and the other in the trading
seaman. Indeed, each sphere of life has, as it were, produced its own tribe of
storytellers. ...

The actual extension of the realm of storytelling in its full historical breadth is inconceivable without the most intimate interpenetration of these two archaic types. Such an interpenetration was achieved particularly by the Middle Ages in their trade structure. The resident master craftsman and the traveling journeymen worked together in the same rooms; and every master had been a traveling journeyman before he settled down in his home town or somewhere else. If peasants and seamen were past masters of storytelling, the artisan class was its university. In it was
combined the lore of faraway places, such as a much-traveled man brings home,
with the lore of the past, as it best reveals itself to natives of a place.

At this point in my "career" I consider myself a resident tiller of the soil -- "the man who has stayed at home, making an honest living, and who knows the local tales and traditions."

As a journalist, I have taken what others have told me, organized it, and passed it on. So far, that's been my form of storytelling (which, Benjamin would argue -- along with the novel -- is a step down from the oral tradition).

There's a lot more to the essay than what I've shown here, but I like the imagery of digging up the stories and sharing them with others. As writers, that's our job -- whether the stories come from others or from our own personal experiences, expressed in both fiction and non-fiction.

What do you think?

(Actually, I think I confused myself in all of this ...)