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| “Charles Reide” by Charles Mercier |
Bear with me here, we’re going philosophical. This has been on my mind a lot lately: Why in the world do we tell stories? Why in the heck do we write?
And then the other day it hit me: Telling stories isn’t what we do in our spare hours, something just to pass the time. Telling stories is what we do period. Stories are how we make sense of life.
Our entire worldview and memories are created out of our stories. Two people can witness the same event, process and interpret it completely differently and reach completely different conclusions about what just happened. And that’s before the fluid and corrosive effects of memory take hold. The reality of the actual event, even if it was recorded on film, blurs into the past. In its place: Stories, our way of interpreting what we have seen, which is all we have to make sense of what passes before our eyes.
We are so adept at distilling our lives into stories that we forget how tenuous a connection they really have to reality, how much we highlight some events while brushing over others, how much our biases come into play, how we will weave together disparate events, even random occurrences, into some sort of cohesive shorthand that can’t possibly capture the enormity of a life. Heck, our stories can’t even fully capture the smallest of moments.
And when it comes down to it, all of our divisions of politics, history, religion, and partisanship come down to different beliefs in different stories. We go to war over different stories, we silently despair over different stories. When our friendships and relationships dissolve they do so because we can’t reconcile our competing narratives. One person’s temper is another person’s passion, one person’s reluctance is another person’s prudence.
How do you explain something as complex as the dissolution of a friendship? We’ll come up with a story that we can explain to others, but if we’re honest with ourselves I think we all sense that there’s some greater truth lurking just outside of our grasp.
Life is too complicated to hold in your head and relationships are too immense and multi-faceted to easily comprehend. So we write and tell stories to make sense of our relationships and existence. A novel can capture more than we can readily contemplate, and an author can, brick by brick, build a world that can illuminate and give meaning to some part of the full tapestry of our lives and relationships. They help us understand things that are too difficult to think about all at once.
Sometimes we catch a glimpse of the dark abyss of uncertainty beyond the comfort of our stories. When our stories are challenged in a particularly incisive way, when they fail to really encompass the totality of what we’re experiencing, when our beliefs are exposed for being mere stories rather than the reality we had tried to transubstantiate out of our fictions, we are confronted with the the chilling fact that there are unknowable truths at the heart of life.
So when faced with that paralyzing taste of uncertainty we retreat back to our narratives and the comforting cohesiveness of our fictions. Even if our stories are, inevitably, imperfect and incomplete.
So eloquently put, Nathan!
Don't you just hate it when everyone agrees with you, Nathan? That's what happens when you have a gift of touching the nerve of the matter… Whatever matter.
Who was it that said "I write to find out what I know"? I came across that quote some time ago and I was blown away by it. Yes, it's true. We write to make sense of life, or in other words, to make sense of what we know. Everything that happens all around us — war, natural disasters, people's attitudes & behavior, anything at all — happens OUTSIDE of us. How we bring it inside us, how we choose to interpret it and make ourselves a participant, is precisely that: a choice. That choice is made based on who we are, on the values we have, on the things we consider important, on what life has "taught" us so far. Telling a story is, in its most basic essence, interpreting reality and putting it out there for someone else to assimilate. It's a powerful, powerful thing.
Storie, the sixth seance!
Great post. I suppose what makes us writers is that we write the stories down.
Once upon a time, a left-handed giant named Dustin went on strike. When his boss called, he …
Gotcha! Stories, yes, both the filters and the coffee of our thoughts.
Thoughtful post, Nathan, matched by the thoughtful comments. Thank you.
Wow. I have to chime in as well. Excellent post. Truly.
And as a partial answer to some of the philosophical questions raised above, I think some people are able to synthesize/craft more complicated, nuanced and thoughtful narratives than others. It's like that in art—why would it be any different in life?
I like that you got a bit philosophical! I agree with your views. Great post!
I think there are more reasons for stories than making sense of life.
The most electrifying stories don't make life more coherent for us, and they don't deconstruct coherence either. Rather, stories point to the edge of meaning- to a truth that we somehow intuit, but can't quite articulate. It's more about concealing something essential rather than coherence. Yet, it's precisely in the act of concealing that the story shows us that there is something infinitely important being concealed. It brings us to the breach of an ineffable knowledge, without allowing us to cross over. It's not that we catch a glimse of the dark abyss that was hidden because of the comforting stories we tell ourselves. Rather, it's the story itself that leads us to the brink of unknowable truths, without fully revealing them to us.
A great story will lead us to the edge of the abyss, but it won't let us leap.
Amen, Mr. Former Agent Man. Amen. That's why I claim all memory, and therefore memoirs, ultimately, are fiction.
It's exactly why Ernest Hemingway called "A Moveable Feast" a "fictional memoir." He never claimed every, or any, event or description of anyone in it was true. Just his truth.
"The only truth any man can ever know for sure," according to Orson Welles in "Citizen Kane."
That's why a great memory, and ability to recall things, is to me the curse and blessing of, hopefully, a fiction writer.
I will be lost and unheard at the bottom, but like you said, we write to make sense of who we are and what life is.
My half-Lakota told me the old teaching tales of her People to lead me to walk wisely. She made up her own tales when I was deathly ill.
All that passed on the spark of the Lakota storyteller to my spirit. I write because I want to see my and her dreams put into print — if only on the computer page. Which is why I put into a book the tales she made up of a bear with two shadows and the cub with no clue.
Have a great summer. Another great post, Roland
Thank you! My unexplicable need to write about everything in my life…an "essai" try to explain my life! I'd love to quote this post, if that's ok.
Interesting perspective and a rather complex one. But it's true we do make up stories about ourselves, our past, our situations and the people we know. It made me think about the true nature of reality and perception. I have a way of simplifying what is real and what isn't. I corale every thought (and story) that is negative into the ficticious pile, and all thoughts and beliefs that are positive I believe have much more credence; or, at the very least have the potential to be true if I take the right actions. This simple gauge has never proven to be wrong – in my opinion.
The media (entertainment and news) tend to present a very negative view of the world and the people in it, so it's an uphill battle to try and focus on the positive. But I've discovered that perceiving others with a cynical attitude has always led me to make wrong assumptions, whereas giving others the benefit of the doubt, or striving to see the best in others, myself and situations has always provided a truer picture of the reality of human nature or any situation.
I get what Patrick is saying and I get what Nathan is saying.
I like how Patrick explained the way we highlight certain things about life to make a point. That whole post was excellent.
Don't hang up on me yet. I'm not finished.
The fact is, there is one truth.
However.
I think Nathan is explaining how many people function or rationalize life. Whether Nathan realizes it or not, what he has just pointed out is that we all see truth differently. This is true. Why? Because we are flawed. We do make up stories to deal with life. That was a very poignant way to describe how the human mind works. We do this because we either don't understand enough truth or we refuse to see and accept truth. It scares us and we don't like to be scared. We like to be in control. We want to be comfortable.
I don't see this post as truth, but rather an explanation of how many people, probably all people to some extent, cope with life.
But, only the truth will set a person free. The stories we make up to cope with life may give us a sense of freedom, but is it true freedom or escape from reality?
Stories are how we make sense of life… Man, that was good timing. My wife and I were driving from Saint Louis to Columbus, Ohio when I received an email from a professor that I respect a whole lot. He had all of the sudden discovered that I was a writer, (even though, when he gave me a questionnaire, I put my own book as my favorite book). He sent an email to me with links to my own book asking me what it was about and if somebody who was going into my profession should associate his name with such things even if it is only fiction.
I was bothered by his email. I had gotten it around the Ohio state line and it took me until well into the evening before I responded. Why did I write this story? Should somebody going into my profession be associated with such a thing? Of course he broke the cardinal rule of books; he judge it by the cover and did not attempt to read it.
I journal in fiction. It's how I cope with life. It is how I make sense of things. My characters are so alive because they are a part of my fiber and my creative energy.
When somebody judges my characters; my writing; my life; I take it personal, because it's me and it's who I am. (I don't mean if you critique my writing fairly. I love those.)
The most common comment that I receive for my first novel is that it is great, the character development is deep, the story line is superb and that the dialogue is top notch. But they all use the same word to describe it. "It's graphic," they say.
Life isn't Pleasantville. Life is graphic. Tell it. Retell it. Learn from it. Teach from it.
Storytelling is how we practice being human.
Let's face it, we're the only species where narrative is a survival mechanism. Our stories teach and emphasize values held by our pack, and we're pack animals and must cooperate to survive.
Our stories – the interpretation of events and worldviews – define and bind us together like the familiar smell of breath and behind define and bind a pack of wolves.
There is no tenuous connection – it IS reality. The mind can't discern between 'reality' and a vividly imagined experience. Storytelling, as a form of missionary work, spreads that reality, even if it's just vividly imagined. And the pack grows larger.
I don't think you can be a story teller without experiencing this revelation.
I believe there is an objective reality, but I've never seen it and I doubt any human has. Human consciousness creates this barrier of interpretation between objective reality and ourselves. "Story" is as good a name for it as any other. We don't percieve objects or events directly. We percieve them within the context of ourselves, and we can't do that without assigning them meaning, without interpreting them through the lens of our thoughts and feelings. We don't truly percieve the world. We percieve the stories we create about it. We need those stories to move the world into our minds where we can think about it, feel it and interpret it.
The world exists inside of us, a different version for each individual, the meaning of objects and events entirely subjective and personal. The stories that result, the beliefs and interpretations we extract from what we percieve, don't even need to map well onto objective reality. Insanity can be understood as reacting to stories about the world that diverge too far from what's real. From that point of view, for a given value of "too far," all of us are mad. So someone who observes an event fits it into their story of the world, which differs from everyone else's story by factors which have as much or more to do with what's inside them already than with what's actually going on.
The thing that's always struck me as remarkable about the stories we tell ourselves is the way we cut them into three pieces: beginning, middle and end; past, present and future. We are encompassed by these things. Human lives are finite, and so begin, continue and end, and they shape every single story we create about the world. We believe things are created, exist and are destroyed, but physics tells us otherwise. Everything changes, but nothing passes. Nothing is lost. When things change so much we no longer recognize them, then we say they're gone. How can they be? Every atom that made them up still exists (unless we force them to undergo fusion or fission… and even then we're just rearranging subatomic particles). Every story we ever created around our interaction still exists in our memories, and we could write new stories including them if only we could accept how the change in them must transform those stories.
In a very real sense, we are all just the sum of the stories we tell ourselves. Our lives have an overarching plot, from birth to death, with a myriad of subplots as small as our next conversation or as large as the quest to raise responsible children.
@ Mira
Funnily enough, when I wrote what I did about stories creating lies/conflict, all I could think about was Hitler! Talk about a master (monster) storyteller who twisted truth to bits…
On a separate note, I wonder if anyone here has read Angela Carter's 'The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories'? It was a real eye-opener for me on the power of stories to expose narrative structures beneath our thinking. I've reviewed it here in case anyone is interested: https://isabellaamaris.blogspot.com/2011/07/boldly-addressing-war-of-sexes-review.html
Cheers, and thank you for the thought-provoking post, Nathan.
I love this essay/blog! As a memoir and journal writer, I write and tell stories to discover meaning. I think you've done a great job of articulating how stories our narratives shape our perception. Philosophize any time.
When it comes writing, is it the same thing to say that "Making Sense of Life" is the same as "exploring emotions"? When I sit down to write something, my idea often starts with something like: "I wonder what it would feel like to…" or "I wonder what emotions cause…". I usually start with an emotion – and move on from there, making it as believable as possible.
Is that the same thing as "making sense of life"?
I feel like writing for therapeutic reasons or writing oral history, as others have discussed, misses how I approach it in some small ways. I want people to have an emotional connection to what I write, even if they don't learn anything from the story or don't understand life better because of it. I don't feel like I'm trying to make sense of anything, but sharing with others some "sense" that I already feel.
At the same time, understanding "why" we feel the way we feel, seems like one of the biggest parts of making sense of our lives.
Am I just repeating a minor part the article or is this something different altogether?
There is a Yiddish proverb that "God made humankind because God loves stories." If that's a reason for God to make something, it's a reason for me to write something.
One of your best posts ever. Thank you.
"We are nothing without stories."
Wendell Berry
I completely agree.
I'm reading _Tolstoy and the Purple Chair_ by Nina Sankovitch right now and it is about exactly this topic. She uses a year of reading one book a day to heal from the death of her sister. I'm really enjoying it because books have helped me heal and make sense of the tough parts of my life too.
As always, Nathan, you're spot on!
I would only add that HOW you do it is what makes the difference between GREAT literature who reveal to us the "meaning" of life and the others who don't – who just limit themselves to "entertain" us.
Sure, having a laugh is fun, but getting a glimpse into the human condition and beginning to understand what it is all about is COOL!