We make sense of the world through stories–we need stories in deeper ways than many people realize. I often talk about these things both in my classes and when I’m speaking on the road. So I was pleased and fascinated to find this piece on stories and how the brain works in yesterday’s New York Times.
We are creatures of time. (That’s as important a definition of the human as another I stress: that we are creatures of language.) But we live in an ever-present now, while being aware of and haunted by a sense of past and future, as other creatures seem not to be. We organize our awareness, our passage through time, by narrative–which of course mimics the passage through time as well.What narrative also does is give shape to our existence, our awareness, as we pass through time. Stories make selections of what to include, what not to include, what to find significant and what not. The shaping also creates meaning. Our lives become meaningful and they become knowable through the process of stories.
What the Times article makes clear is that we’re all doing this all the time. We create a running narrative of our own lives. This narrative is not only always evolving, it is constantly mercurial and changing as well, according to context, mood, perspective, etc, etc.
One of the keenest of ironies, and the most urgent, is what we also know that other creatures don’t: that the story will have an end. We will die. We all yearn, naturally enough, for a “happy ending,” but, well, what constitutes a happy ending?
Obviously, that’s part of why we also need stories that aren’t our own internal ones. We need the cultural tales that define our societies, whether religious, historical, legendary, and so on. And we turn for pleasure and deep meaning to the poems, novels, essays that constitute literature. It’s even why consume narratives through television, film, video.
I sometimes despair about the future of literature per se. Despite what the modernists used to say, literature need not be difficult or demanding, available only to an educated and inclined elite. But good stories and poems do demand time, thoughtfulness, concentration, all of which are in short supply in our world. I can only hope that readers–whatever the medium through which their reading–will always seek more than the dumbed-down stories of our video culture.