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True Stories
Why does everything in the world today have to be, so to speak, a federal case? Why is everything suddenly an outrage, a pathology – a “life-ending” mistake? Used to be you could say or do something stupid, or even not-so-stupid, and it wouldn’t make you an outcast or even a bad person.
But then, it used to be that we told happy stories, true stories, once upon a time . . . Stories that weren’t just abstract or hothouse notions in the heads of their creators, perpetuated when people who don’t know any better take them seriously and think they’re representations of real life.
Stories can be dangerous things – especially when encountered by young, inexperienced people – and a story can be as small as a word and as vast as the assumptions it encompasses. Stories can warp lives, even if we don’t realise what we’re surrounded by is a story.
It can work another way, too. If you take away the stories that people used to live by – stories of heroes and happy endings, of honour, honesty, and truth, and yes, of true love – then what alternatives do they turn to instead? And what follows from that?
But then, maybe that is, as they say, another story . . .
Published in Culture
Well written Andrew. Keep writing those stories.
Thank you.
Will do. :)
Put me on the list of people who’d like to have fewer “national conversations,” please. A thought that runs through my mind almost every time I scan a so-called “news site” and find it infested with the trite, the superficial, the prurient and the irrelevant. And as far as I can see, at least three-quarters of whatever’s on any of the 7x24x365 news channels on any given day could be jettisoned, and we’d all be much the better for it.
Having served my turn in quite a few barrels during the course of my long and happy life, (perhaps even on this site, on occasion), I follow this with a resounding Amen!
Truer words have not been written.
One of the things I like about Ricochet is that y’all seem pretty darned forgiving…for which I have reason to be very grateful!
Just quoting this because I wanted to “Like” it again.
From a post I wrote a while back:
And I am so, so sorry for the children whose early years don’t include them.
There is nothing better than true love in the whole world. Except a nice MLT. Mutton, lettuce, and tomato when the mutton is nice and lean and the lettuce is nice and crisp. Ohhh you can’t beat it.
The story of Job?…
Perhaps the meat of Job’s story (the prologue and epilogue seem almost beside the point) is the first postmodernist story in the Western canon. Postmodernism tends to get a bad rap on the right, for a reason I think this guy puts pretty well:
Think of the Grand Narrative the story (or unstory) of Job is part of: the Biblical Narrative. Job’s story is evidently meant to add to the Grand Narrative, not negate it. Else why not conveniently exclude it from the Grand Narrative?
This world doesn’t always make sense on a human scale and in human terms. Not even the God who saves us always does. And yet the Christian story of the incarnation is that, even so, sometimes God does come to us, to be understood on terms accessible to us (although even then it’s not complete understanding, going by what Jesus himself says in the Gospels).
Sometimes life is absurd. People vary in how much of their lives is lived in the absurdity –and importantly, not all of this variation is by choice. Since life contains both kinds of stories — both our Grand Narratives and the unstories where our precious Grand Narratives fail — it makes sense for us to need both kinds of stories.
The mistake is not in including stories of absurdity — which are stories many people desperately need — but in excluding the other stories. So, let’s not.
Let’s be greedy and have all the stories :-)
The post-modern understanding is virtually indistinguishable from what they would call the pre-modern understanding. It is not that we don’t understand now, it is that we can’t understand ever.
Until we get the whole ordinances of heaven thing scoped out. Then it’ll be easy-peasy.