Narrative Essay Quotes

If what's always distinguished bad writing--flat characters, a narrative world that's clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.--is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then [Bret] Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we'd probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what's human and magical that still live and glow despite the times' darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what's wrong, because they'll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony's gone from liberating to enslaving. There's some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who's come to love his cage… The postmodern founders' patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent. You burn with hunger for food that does not exist. A U. S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness.

An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. . . . We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness.

Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.

...however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back".

A fictional narrative is considered nuanced when it includes contradictions, but a narrative of trauma is ill-advised to do the same.

Over time, I have come to see the work of literature less as narrating the world than "seeing the world with words." From the moment he begins to use words like colors in a painting, a writer can begin to see how wondrous and surprising the world is, and he breaks the bones of language to find his own voice. For this he needs paper, a pen, and the optimism of a child looking at the world for the first time.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind. War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. (On the manipulation of language for political ends.) We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.

Irony serves as an alibi for a fetish.

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.

The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person? Not directed above us, nor beneath us, but at the same height as our own gaze. Art cannot be experienced collectively, nothing can, art is something you are alone with. You meet its gaze alone.

Books mimic adrenaline to the narratively restless: nests of worlds in which the mind takes predestined flights from time and place.

When life gives you twists and turns, Chique Yourself Up in Italy!

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.

Meningitis, like the virus that caused it, wasn't a metaphor or a narrative device. It was just a disease. But we are hardwired to look for patterns, to make constellations from the stars. There must be some logic to the narrative, some reason for the misery.

Part of the reason I actually preferred Twin Peaks's second season to its first was the fascinating spectacle of watching a narrative structure disintegrate and a narrative artist freeze up and try to shuck and jive when the plot reached a point where his own weaknesses as an artist were going to be exposed (just imagine the fear: this disintegration was happening on national TV).

In a 2016 essay, the writer and former soldier Roy Scranton describes watching Star Wars while stationed in Baghdad. He is forced in that moment to confront the reality that so much of the American self-image demands a narrative in which his country plays the role of the rebel, the resistance, when at the same time every shred of contemporary evidence around him leads to the conclusion that, by scope and scale and purpose of violence, this country is clearly the empire. A central privilege of being of this place becomes, then, the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously.

There are things that can only be understood retrospectively, when many years have passed and the story has ended. In the meantime, while the story continues, the only thing to do is tell it over and over again as it develops, bifurcates, knots around itself. And it must be told, because before anything can be understood, it has to be narrated many times, in many different words and from my different angles, by many different minds.

The art lies in setting the inner life into the most violent motion with the smallest possible expenditure of outer life; for it is the inner life which is the real object of our interest - The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting.

Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful; it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.

The novel is the privileged vehicle of two ways of being: narrative and freedom: to be new (novel) in a speech open to all, and to be free in a speech that never concludes.

life expectancy among working-class white Americans had been decreasing since the early 2000s. In modern history the only obvious parallel was with Russia in the desperate aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union. One journalistic essay and academic research paper after another confirmed the disaster, until the narrative was capped in 2015 by Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s famous account of “deaths of despair.

there are no objects except particular ones and no science except of the general

As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis.

Oh Beck, I love reading your e-mail. Learning your life. And I am careful; I always mark new messages unread so that you won't get alarmed. My good fortune doesn't stop there; You prefer e-mail. You don't like texting. So this means that I am not missing out on all that much communication. You wrote an "essay" for some blog in which you stated that "e-mails last forever. You can search for any word at any time and see everything you ever said to anyone about that one word. Texts go away." I love you for wanting a record. I love your records for being so accessible and I'm so full of you, your calendar of caloric intake and hookups and menstrual moments, your self-portraits you don't publish, your recipes and exercises. You will know me soon too, I promise.

expatriation, like love, is not only a condition that devastates and reconfigures the self; it is, like love, a trope, a figure with which we try to explain, try to narrate profound psychological disruptions in terms of very measurable entities: a person, a place, an event, a moment, etc.

We thought that replacing the singular, authoritative voice of the twentieth century newscaster with the digitally-enabled vox populi of the internet would forever change the narrative. All it did was ruin the spelling.

if takes an asshole to challenge religion, the vanguard of the atheist movement will inevitably over-represent the assholes. Many have argued that we need to combat the narrative by providing the contrary examples and while I agree that this will certainly help, I submit that the best way to combat a stereotype is to hold the people perpetuating that stereotype accountable. 

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

The tickling narrative, unlike the sexual narrative, has no climax. Is the tickling scene, at its most reassuring, not a unique representation of desire and, at its most unsettling, a paradigm of the perverse contract? Does it not highlight, this delightful game, the impossibility of satisfaction and of reunion, with its continual reenactment of the irresistible attraction and the inevitable repulsion of the object, in which the final satisfaction is frustration?

History resists an ending as surely as nature abhors a vacuum; the narrative of our days is a run-on sentence, every full stop a comma in embryo. But more: like thought, like water, history is fluid, unpredictable, dangerous. It leaps and surges and doubles back, cuts unpredictable channels, surfaces suddenly in places no one would expect.

Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history's night. The materials of memoir are humble, fugitive, a cottage knitting industry seeking narrative truth across the crevasse of time as autobiography folds itself into the vast, fluid essay that is history. A single voice singing its aria in a corner of the crowded world.

Twenty or twenty-five years ago, contraception and enlightenment were held to be almost synonymous.

Personal essays are often nostalgia-fused narratives written by authors with authenticity fetishes.

Doubtless any horoscope seems "true" if it tells that you are highly attractive to the opposite sex and your worst fault is generosity.

Here the narrator bursts into explosion after explosion of thunderous horse-laughter, repeating that nub from time to time through his gaspings and shriekings and suffocatings.

The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting.

Similar to any form of meditation, the act of contemplative writing ultimately changes us since it alters how we view the past, the present, and the future.

In the era of fake news - a natural extension of the era of news proper - we don't just look to the media for facts, we look to it for narratives.

What I resent in 12 Years a Slave is how the suffering of women is used to further a man’s narrative.

Prose writers, by contrast, are unreliable friends: They are always studying you to see if there’s anything in your personality or appearance that they can steal for their next narrative.

I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles ... There cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism — that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.

Because of the way human beings relate to narrative, we tend to identify with those characters we find appealing. We try to see ourselves in them. The same I.D.-relation, however, also means that we try to see them in ourselves. When everybody we seek to identify with for six hours a day is pretty, it naturally becomes more important to us to be pretty, to be viewed as pretty. Because prettiness becomes a priority for us, the pretty people on TV become all the more attractive, a cycle which is obviously great for TV. But it’s less great for us civilians, who tend to own mirrors, and who also tend not to be anywhere near as pretty as the TV-images we want to identify with. Not only does this cause some angst personally, but the angst increases because, nationally, everybody else is absorbing six-hour doses and identifying with pretty people and valuing prettiness more, too. This very personal anxiety about our prettiness has become a national phenomenon with national consequences.

The presence in a memoir or an essay of the truth speaker - the narrator that a writer pulls out of his or her own agitated and boring self to organize a piece of experience - it was about this alone that I felt I had something to say; and it was to those works in which such a narrator comes through strong and clear that I was invariably drawn.

The themes of metamorphosis (transformation-particularly human transformation-and identity (particularly human identity) are drawn from the treasury of pre-class world folklore. The folkloric image of man is intimately bound up with transformation and identity. This combination may be seen with particular clarity in the popular folktale )skazkaj. The folktale image of man-throughout the extraordinary variety of folkloric narratives-always orders itself around the motifs of transformation and identity (no matter how varied in its turn the concrete expression of these motifs might be).

The motor of fiction is narrative. The motor of essay is thought. The default of fiction is storytelling. The default of essay is memoir. Fiction: no ideas but in things. (Serious) essay (what I want): not the thing itself but ideas about the thing.

Built-in shelves line my bedroom, adjacent to my Japanese platform bed, purchased for its capacious rim, the better to hold those books that must be immediately accessible. Yet still they pile on my nightstand, and the grid of shelves continues in floor-to-ceiling formation across the wall, stampeding over the doorway in disorderly fashion, political memoirs mixed in with literary essays, Victorian novels fighting for space with narrative adventure, the Penguin classics never standing together in a gracious row no matter how hard I try to impose order. The books compete for attention, assembling on the shelf above the sofa on the other side of the room, where they descend by the window, staring back at me. As I lie in bed with another book, they lie in wait.

But histories differ from novels in that they insist on a homology between the sequence of their own telling, the form they impose to create a coherent explanation in the form of a narrative on the one hand, and the sequence of what they tell on the other.

In all imaginative writing sympathy for the subject is necessary not because it is the politically correct or morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind: engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension. The empathy that allows us, the readers, to see the "other" as the other might see him or herself is the empathy that provides movement in the writing. When someone writes a Mommie Dearest memoir - where the narrator is presented as an innocent and the subject as a monster - the work fails because the situation remains static. For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life.

From the cover blurb on the University of Wisconsin Press edition, writer unknown: Discussing memoirs, diaries, collaborative narratives, photo documentaries, essays, and other forms of life writing, G. Thomas Couser shows that these books are not primarily records of medical conditions; they are a means for individuals to recover their bodies (or those of loved ones) from marginalization and impersonal medical discourse. Responding to the recent growth of illness and disability narratives in the United States....

Our cultural obsession with murder stories and the criminal justice system is a prime example of the impulse to narrativize a reality that is basically unexplainable. For better or worse, narrative is the tool that the system uses to deliver justice: the defense and the prosecution each present their stories, and the one that makes more sense— read as: the more satisfying one— becomes the reality.

Never worry about the reader, what the reader can understand. When you are writing, glance over your shoulder, and you’ll find there is no reader. Just you and the page. Feel lonely? Good! Assuming you can write clear English (or Norwegian) sentences, give up all worry about communication. If you want to communicate, use the telephone. To write a poem you have to have a streak of arrogance (…) when you are writing you must assume that the next thing you put down belongs not for reasons of logic, good sense, or narrative development, but because you put it there. You, the same person who said that, also said this. The adhesive force is your way of writing, not sensible connection.

Say what you will about it, Hell is story friendly. If you want a compelling story, put your protagonist among the damned. The mechanisms of hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures of Paradise. Paradise is not a story. It's about what happens when the stories are over.

We crave nothing less that the perfect story; And while we chatter or listen all our lives to a din of craving – jokes, anecdotes, novels, dreams, films, plays, songs, half the words of our days – We are satisfied only by the one short tale we feel to be true; History is the will of a just God who knows us.

Next day Tarrou set to work and enrolled a first team of workers, soon to be followed by many others. However, it is not the narrator's intention to ascribe to these sanitary groups more importance than their due. Doubtless today many of our fellow citizens are apt to yield to the temptation of exaggerating the services they rendered. But the narrator is inclined to think that by attributing overimportance to praiseworthy actions one may, by implication, be paying indirect but potent homage to the worse side of human nature. For this attitude implies that such actions shine out as rare exceptions, while callousness and apathy are the general rule. The narrator does not share that view. The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art; Annie Dillard and Cort Conley, eds., Modern American Memoirs; Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory; Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life; Phillip Lopate, ed., The Art of the Personal Essay; Jane Taylor McDonnell, Living to Tell the Tale: A Guide to Writing Memoir; and William Zinsser, ed., Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir.

For are we not all, at times, exactly like Poe’s narrators—beating upon the confining walls of circumstance, the limits of the universe? In spiritual work, with good luck (or grace) we come to accept life’s brevity for ourselves. But the lover that is in each of us—the part of us that adores another person—ah! That is another matter.

Society itself falls apart into class and intraclass groups; individual life-sequences are directly linked with these and together both individual life and subgroups are opposed to the whole. Thus in the early stages of slaveholding society and in feudal society, individual life-sequences are still rather tightly interwoven with the common life of the most immediate social group. But nevertheless they are separate, even here. The course of individual lives, of groups, and of the sociopolitical whole do not fuse together, they are dispersed, there are gaps; they are measured by different scales of value; each of these series has its own logic of development, its own narratives, each makes use of and reinterprets the ancient motifs in its own way. Within the boundaries of individual life-series, an interior aspect makes itself apparent. The process of separating out and detaching individual life-sequences from the whole reaches its highest point when financial relations develop in slaveholding society, and under capitalism. Here the individual sequence takes on its specific private character and what is held in common becomes maximally abstract. The ancient motifs that had passed into the individual life-narratives here undergo a specific kind of degeneration. Food, drink, copulation and so forth lose their ancient "pathos" (their link, their unity with the laboring life of the social whole); they become a petty private matter; they seem to exhaust all their significance within the boundaries of individual life. As a result of this severance from the producing life of the whole and from the collective struggle with nature, their real links with the life of nature are weakened-if not severed altogether.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era. Every reform was once a private opinion, and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the problem of the age. The fact narrated must correspond to something in me to be credible or intelligible. We as we read must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner, must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.

Not every narrative is an arc. The universe, for example, just keeps expanding.

Narrative is an accumulation of knowledge about the future. We begin in the present and end in the present, and in the middle is an accumulation of future possibilities

You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars themselves neither require nor demand it.

One of the signs of a dysfunctional narrative is that we cannot leave it behind, and we cannot put it to rest, because it does not, finally, give us the explanation we need to enclose it.

Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn, incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see. And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing wherever you can, like the monk on the road who knows precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death-forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vastness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part.

Serious fiction writers think about moral problems practically. They tell stories. They narrate. They evoke our common humanity in narratives with which we can identify, even though the lives may be remote from our own. They stimulate our imagination. The stories they tell enlarge and complicate—and, therefore, improve—our sympathies. They educate our capacity for moral judgment.

The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.

Thus we come to the problem of determining what the poem is 'about.' Charles Altieri notes that '[a]n expression of the self can be one that is intended, the self's act, or one that is symptomatic, the act of a self not in control of what it manifests'(24) In 'Yankee Doodle,' and to a lesser extent in '$$$$$$," the interesting aspects of the poem are not 'the intended expression of the self.' The lack of explicitness is not suggestive in any positive sense because we feel that were things to be spelled out, this would weaken, not strengthen, the narrator's case by revealing the unacknowledged irrationality at the root of it.

A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens--second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.

The pieces in this book, then, are quite literally “speculative writing,” neither stories nor essays but something more like fables: compressed narratives, grounded in real experience and as true as they need to be, with little “morals” at the end. They move directly from what I have seen and experienced to what I think about it, from the particular to the general, with none of the recursiveness of ordinary essays and short stories.

For a few days after getting into the water the toad concentrates on building up his strength by eating small insects. Presently he has swollen to his normal size again, and then he goes through a phase of intense sexiness.

I am thus led to the proposition that there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative...A novel is a printed circuit through which flows the force of a reader's own life.

My stories are malevolently anti-narrative, and my essays are maliciously anti-expository, but the ideology of my opposition arrived long after my antagonism had become a trait of character." -- William H. Gass, "Finding a Form

Personal essayists attempt to create stories out of their true-life events in order to interpret reality, that is, they attempt to use writing to escape a vapid reality where they remain fixated upon their private deprivations and personal deformities.

When we say that a narrative is, or is not, someone’s ‘story to tell’, what we unwittingly suggest is that when the story is yours, as in it happened within time as you directly experience it, you are given some power over it. Is this the biggest betrayal of pop psychology via talk therapy? That in language a person can find sufficient tools to erect a life undisturbed by demons? Or the thought, even, that a person can comprehend what it is they have lived through. - Survivors of all things, always trying to reconstruct the moment they survived through. - Strange, though, that even as you narrate it, you get to the horror point, and you think, this time, it’ll go differently. But the film reel keeps playing through, all the way, and, whoosh: powerless.

Storytelling entails weaving a narrative out of the disturbing, strange, inspirational, and unremarkable detritus of life. By picking among the litter of our personal experiences to select evocative anecdotes to weave into a narrative format, we reveal which of life’s legendary offerings prove the most sublime to us. Acts of omission are momentous. Our narration of personal sketches divulge what factoids inspire us or do not stir us into action, or contain obdurate truths that prove virtually impossible to crack.

The Cinderella narrative is so ubiquitous–and so integrated into how we think about love–that it’s easy to dismiss. I spent years thinking someone would notice me eventually as long as I dedicated myself to being good and sweet and modest and basically unnoticeable. When I started my first serious relationship, I didn’t notice that my boyfriend’s goal was to become an interesting person through having interesting experiences; whereas I hoped to prove my worth by being loved by the most interesting person I knew: him.

Many of our friends who grew up here now live in Brooklyn, where they are at work on “book-length narratives.” Another contingent has moved to the Bay Area and made a fortune there. Every year or so, these west-coasters travel back to Michigan and call us up for dinner or drinks, occasions they use to educate us on the inner workings of the tech industry. They refer to the companies they work for in the first person plural, a habit I have yet to acculturate to. Occasionally they lapse into the utopian, speaking of robotics ordinances and brain-computer interfaces and the mystical, labyrinthine channels of capital, conveying it all with the fervency of pioneers on a civilizing mission. Being lectured quickly becomes dull, and so my husband and I, to amuse ourselves, will sometimes play the rube. “So what, exactly, is a venture capitalist?” we’ll say. Or: “Gosh, it sounds like science fiction.” I suppose we could tell them the truth—that nothing they’re proclaiming is news; that the boom and bustle of the coastal cities, like the smoke from those California wildfires, liberally wafts over the rest of the country. But that seems a bit rude. We are, after all, Midwesterners. Here, work is work and money is money, and nobody speaks of these things as though they were spiritual movements or expressions of one’s identity.

A shaman and a writer each serve as their communities’ seers by engaging in extraordinary acts of conscientious study of the past and the present and predicting the future. An inner voice calls to the shaman and an essayistic writer to answer the call that vexes the pernicious spirit of their times. Shamanistic writers induce a trance state of mind where they lose contact with physical reality through a rational disordering of the senses, in an effort to encounter for the umpteenth time the great unknown and the unutterable truths that structure existence. An afflicted person seeking clarification of existence cannot ignore the shamanistic calling of narrative exposition. Thus, I shall continue this longwinded howl – making a personal immortality vessel – into the darkness of night forevermore.

Chuck functions here as a kind of authenticity fetish, allowing Hans (and the reader) the nostalgic pleasure of returning to a narrative time when symbols and mottoes were full of meaning and novels weren’t neurotic, but could aim themselves simply and purely at transcendent feeling.

For the college essay, she wrote that in these stories, being orphaned is a precondition for the making of a hero. She also said those comic book heroes aren’t simple heroes, but ‘complicated ones who make moral compromises in the same tradition as the orphans in Victorian narratives.

The trouble with Malaysia is we are subconsciously trying to erase our past. The history beyond the prescribed narrative of The Alliance achieving Merdeka and Tunku calling out "Merdeka" seven times are often undiscussed - or worse, considered untrue and disrespectful - within the mainstream.

Why did you come to the United States?' That's the first question on the intake questionnaire for unaccompanied child migrants. The questionnaire is used in the federal immigration court in New York City where I started working as a volunteer interpreter in 2015. My task there is a simple one: I interview children, following the intake questionnaire, and then translate their stories from Spanish to English. But nothing is ever that simple. I hear words, spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives. They are delivered with hesitance, sometimes distrust, always with fear. I have to transform them into written words, succinct sentences, and barren terms. The children's stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle, and no end.

The judicious words of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), the first existentialist philosopher, are apropos to end this lumbering manuscript. 1. “One must learn to know oneself before knowing anything else.” 2. “Life always expresses the results of our dominate thoughts.” 3. “Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.” 4. “Personality is only ripe when a man has made the truth his own.” 5. “Love is all, it gives all, and it takes all.” 6. “Don’t forget to love yourself.” 7. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” 8. “Life has its own hidden forces, which you can only discover by living.” 9. “The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, or read about, nor seen, but if one will, are to be lived.” 10. “Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.” 11. “It seems essential, in relationships and all tasks, that we concentrate on only what is most significant and important.” 12. “To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.” 13. “Since my earliest childhood, a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays I am ironic, if it is pulled out I shall die.” 14. “A man who as a physical being is always turned to the outside, thinking that his happiness lies outside of him, finally turns inward and discovers that the source is within him.” 15. “Just as in earthly life lovers long for the moment when they are able to breathe forth their love for each other, to let their souls blend into a soft whisper, so the mystic longs for the moment in prayer he can, as it were, creep into God.” Kierkegaard warned, “The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss – an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. – is sure to be noticed.” Kierkegaard said that the one method to avoid losing oneself is to live joyfully in the moment, which he described as “to be present in oneself in truth,” which in turn requires “to be today, in truth be today.

For “decent” guys, comfortably vested with patriarchal authority, the nightmare is merely to be questioned, to no longer be the narrator of their own story. In Gone Girl, Flynn cracks open the American mainstream and lets Nick say one of our unsayable beliefs: that it is scarier for a man to be accused than to be killed.

Hundreds of experiments into the misinformation effect have been conducted, and people have been convinced of all sorts of things. Screwdrivers become wrenches, white men become black men, and experiences involving other people get traded back and forth. In one study, [Elizabeth] Loftus convinced people they were once lost in a shopping mall as a child. She had subjects read four essays provided by family members, but the one about getting lost as a kid was fake. A quarter of the subjects incorporated the fake story into their memory and even provided details about the fictional event that were not included in the narrative. Loftus even convinced people they shook hands with Bugs Bunny, who isn’t a Disney character, when they visited Disney World as a kid, just by showing them a fake advertisement where a child was doing the same. She altered the food preferences of subjects in one experiment where she lied to people, telling them they had reported becoming sick from eating certain things as a child. A few weeks later, when offered those same foods, those people avoided them. In other experiments, she implanted memories of surviving drowning and fending off animal attacks— none of them real, all of them accepted into the autobiography of the subjects without resistance.

The reader must not imagine that he is to find in it wisdom, brilliancy, fertility of invention, ingenuity of construction, excellence of form, purity of style, perfection of imagery, truth to nature, clearness of statement, humanly possible situations, humanly possible people, fluent narrative, connected sequence of events

The thing that is called ‘mainstream fiction’ is an invalid masquerade of the world. It wears masks identical to the faces under the masks; it wears costumes identical to the clothes under the costumes; it enclosed the ‘world sets’ in ‘theatrical sets’ of the same appearance. What kind of masquerade is that which does not mask?

The myth of America’s religious founding thus provided an explanation for those who needed to sanctify the past before they could go forward with America’s chosen mission and its manifest destiny. This myth, promoted in patriotic addresses, sermons, essays, and in school books, became the dominant narrative of America’s founding.

I'll call any length of fiction a story, whether it be a novel or a shorter piece, and I'll call anything a story in which specific characters and events influence each other to form a meaningful narrative. I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one. Then they find themselves writing a sketch with an essay woven through it, or an essay with a sketch woven through it, or an editorial with a character in it, or a case history with a moral, or some other mongrel thing. When they realize that they aren't writing stories, they decide that the remedy for this is to learn something that they refer to as "the technique of the short story" or "the technique of the novel." Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.

3.6.40: From a letter from Lady Oxford15 to the Daily Telegraph, on the subject of war economies: "Since most London houses are deserted there is little entertaining ... in any case, most people have to part with their cooks and live in hotels." Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99% of the population exist.

Necessary features of the human mind impose structure upon our experiences. Language acts as a gatekeeper for the mind. We learn and embark on personal transformation by formulating, revising, and refining our conception of the world each time that we encounter new facts, experiences, ideas, and viewpoints. To understand the world a person must employ reason and organize their episodic personal experiences into a system of narrative thought. The language that we employ to internalize our personal experiences constructs our mental system, and our mental thoughts in turn regulate us. We become of a personification of our language, as expressed in narrative stories of the self.

Faced with an ecological crisis whose roots lie in this disengagement, in the separation of human agency and social responsibility from the sphere of our direct involvement with the non-human environment, it surely behoves us to reverse this order of priority. I began with the point that while both humans and animals have histories of their mutual relations, only humans narrate such histories. But to construct a narrative, one must already dwell in the world and, in the dwelling, enter into relationships with its constituents, both human and non-human. I am suggesting that we rewrite the history of human-animal relations, taking this condition of active engagement, of being-in-the-world, as our starting point. We might speak of it as a history of human concern with animals, insofar as this notion conveys a caring, attentive regard, a 'being with'. And I am suggesting that those of us who are 'with' animals in their day-to-day lives, most notably hunters and herdsmen, can offer us some of the best possible indications of how we might proceed.

Through all this relentlessly advancing technology the same brain gropes through its diminishing neurons for images and narratives that will lift lumps out of the earth and put them under the glass case of published print. With ominous frequency, I can’t think of the right word. I know there is a word; I can visualize the exact shape it occupies in the jigsaw puzzle of the English language. But the word itself, with its precise edges and unique tint of meaning, hangs on the misty rim of consciousness. Eventually, with shamefaced recourse to my well-thumbed thesaurus or to a germane encyclopedia article, I may pin the word down, only to discover that it unfortunately rhymes with the adjoining word of the sentence.

For those who haven’t yet experienced climate collapse in our own bodies, a history not yet written into us, the feeling it arrives in the shape of shadows, an atmospheric wrongness, and harrowing predictions; these are stories that change our own. The moment we begin to truly engage with climate science, our narratives of self and future are whirled out of orbit.

For Plato and Socrates, the philosopher is one who lives according to virtue and reason, cultivating the pleasures of the soul and intellect and not the pleasures and passions of the baser desires of the body. The key to this path is grasping first that there are absolutes—absolute truth, goodness, beauty, and other aspects of life. These are universal forms that are recollected from our past lives and ultimately harken back to the One, or the monad, from which all things mysteriously emanated. We, as humans, “see” truly through the soul, and seeing with this higher, awakened eyesight allows us to peer into the higher realm of existence where truth is eternal, not subject to the chaotic flux and temporal finitude and change of this life.

The principal advantage of narrative writing is that it assists us place our life experiences in a storytelling template. The act of strict examination forces us to select and organize our past. Narration provides an explanatory framework. Human beings often claim to understand events when they manage to formulate a coherent story or narrative explaining what factors caused a specific incident to occur. Stories assist the human mind to remember and make decisions based on informative stories. Narrative writing also prompts periods of intense reflection that leads to more writing that is ruminative. Contemplative actions call for us to track the conscious mind at work rendering an accounting of our weaknesses and our strengths, folly and wisdom.

Interpretation first appears in the culture of late classical antiquity, when the power and credibility of myth had been broken by the “realistic” view of the world introduced by scientific enlightenment. Once the question that haunts post-mythic consciousness—that of the seemliness of religious symbols—had been asked, the ancient texts were, in their pristine form, no longer acceptable. Then interpretation was summoned, to reconcile the ancient texts to “modern” demands. Thus, the Stoics, to accord with their view that the gods had to be moral, allegorized away the rude features of Zeus and his boisterous clan in Homer’s epics. What Homer really designated by the adultery of Zeus with Leto, they explained, was the union between power and wisdom. In the same vein, Philo of Alexandria interpreted the literal historical narratives of the Hebrew Bible as spiritual paradigms. The story of the exodus from Egypt, the wandering in the desert for forty years, and the entry into the promised land, said Philo, was really an allegory of the individual soul’s emancipation, tribulations, and final deliverance. Interpretation thus presupposes a discrepancy between the clear meaning of the text and the demands of (later) readers. It seeks to resolve that discrepancy. The situation is that for some reason a text has become unacceptable; yet it cannot be discarded. Interpretation is a radical strategy for conserving an old text, which is thought too precious to repudiate, by revamping it. The interpreter, without actually erasing or rewriting the text, is altering it. But he can’t admit to doing this. He claims to be only making it intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning. However far the interpreters alter the text (another notorious example is the Rabbinic and Christian “spiritual” interpretations of the clearly erotic Song of Songs), they must claim to be reading off a sense that is already there.

You adapt yourself, Paul Klee said, to the contents of the paintbox. Adapting yourself to the contents of the paintbox, he said, is more important than nature and its study. The painter, in other words, does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

I need fiction, I am an addict. This is not a figure of speech. I don’t quite read a novel a day, but I certainly read some of a novel every day, and usually some of several. There is always a heap of opened paperbacks face down near the bed, always something current on the kitchen table to reach for over coffee when I wake up. Colonies of prose have formed in the bathroom and in the dimness of the upstairs landing, so that I don’t go without text even in the leftover spaces of the house where I spend least time….I can be happy with an essay or a history if it interlaces like a narrative, if its author uses fact or impression to make a story-like sense, but fiction is kind, fiction is the true stuff….I don’t give it up. It is entwined too deeply within my history, it has been forming the way I see for too long.

By teaching students of color that the best way to succeed is to respond to tests the way the state demands, determine the validity of an argument under the state’s rules, and examine essays only if they follow the state’s standards, we are creating education via deculturation, or stripping a culture, instead of transculturation, the merging of cultures. We didn’t land on education reform. Education reform landed on us.

In marriage, the woman compensates for her lack of external power by commandeering the story. Isn't that right? She fills the silence, the mystery of her own acts and aims, with a structured account of life whose relationship to the truth might sometimes be described as voluntary. I am familiar with that account: I spent my childhood listening to it. And what I noticed was how, over the years, its repetitions and elisions and exaggerations ceased to exasperate its listeners so much as silence them. After a while, people stopped bothering to try to put the record straight: on the contrary, they became, in a curious way, dependent on the teller of this tale, in which they featured as central characters. The sheer energy and wilful, self-constructing logic of narrative, which at first made one cringe and protest every time the truth was dented, came over time to seem preferable to elusive, chaotic reality.

I was hostile, and I had every right to be. Middle school didn't make any sense. If you were mean, people liked you. If you were nice, people were mean. If you teased girls, they smiled and laughed. If you complimented them, they frowned and walked away. If you were bad in class, you were hailed in the hallway. If you were good in class, you were bullied in the locker room. The pretty girls dated the ugly boys, and the only friends you had were the ones you didn't want.

Over recent years I had increasingly lost faith in literature. I read and thought this is something someone has made up. Perhaps it was because we were totally inundated with fiction and stories... All these millions of paperbacks, hardbacks, DVDs and TV series, they were all about made-up people in a made-up, though realistic, world. And news in the press, TV news and radio news had exactly the same format, documentaries had the same format, they were also stories, and it made no difference whether what they told had actually happened or not... Fictional writing has no value, documentary narrative has no value. The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet. What is a work of art if not the gaze of another person?

Perhaps I can follow a heroic existential nihilist’s sterling example of surviving the harshness of reality by employing an attentive narrative examination of my recalcitrant life to extract shards of personal truth and elicit a synthesizing purposefulness of my being from the darkness, anarchy, and chaos of existence. Perhaps through the act of engaging in a deliberative examination of the ontological mystery of being and investigating the accompanying stark brutal doubt that renders a materialistic life intolerably senseless, absurd, and meaningless, I can confront the baffle of being and establish a guiding set of personal values to live by in an indifferent world. Perhaps by using the contemplative tools of narrative storytelling, I can strictly scrutinize the key leaning rubrics veiled within an array of confusing personal life experiences. Perhaps by engaging in a creative act of discovery I can blunt the pain and anguish that comes from the nightmarish experience of suffering from an existential crisis.

The mind wants to live forever, or to learn a very good reason why not. The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, even God. The mind’s sidekick, however, will settle for two eggs over easy. The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel. And, incredibly, the simple spaniel can lure the brawling mind to its dish. It is everlastingly funny that the proud, metaphysically ambitious, clamoring mind will hush if you give it an egg.

For roughly thirty years, young people at Western schools and universities have been given the idea of a liberal education, without the substance of historical knowledge. They have been taught isolated ‘modules’, not narratives, much less chronologies. They have been trained in the formulaic analysis of document excerpts, not in the key skill of reading widely and fast. They have been encouraged to feel empathy with imagined Roman centurions or Holocaust victims, not to write essays about why and how their predicaments arose.

One member of Paley's preschool class is 'The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter.' He is probably vaguely autistic, high-functioning, yet solitary to a degree considered irregular. His playmates invite him into their games (which are ongoing, morphing narratives), but he stubbornly resists. He loves his helicopter. He would like to be a helicopter himself so that he could fly with his friend, the machine, and have adventures. Machine adventures. Rescue missions, yet with rotors, so that, perhaps, there wouldn't be hugging involved. (Antonya Nelson)

A biography of civilization does not consist exclusively of wars, politics, and acts of villainy, but also consist of the culture, art, religion, and communication methods of a society. The written word outlasts human life. We can understand how other civilizations lived by reviewing the account of great philosopher’s lives and ideas. We also acquire valuable knowledge of the cultural context of prior eras by reviewing the historical narrative left by ordinary people including their letters and journals describing everyday life and living conditions.

In the name of perfectionism, I have tried to stick to a linear narrative in describing my history of anxiety and depression, as it is trajectory that most of us can follow in our surface comings and goings. Hopefully I was able to transcend it just a little. Maybe you can relate to my what the fuckness and feel a little better about your own. All I want from you is to be liked. Of course, that is a scared woman's way of saying what I really want, which is to connect with you on a deep and true level while I am still on this earth, and maybe even after I am off it.

Narrative writing about our personal experiences and exploring our beliefs is difficult in part because of the web of the lies that we tell ourselves in order to maintain our delicate sense of dignity. Inevitable we are the victims and heroes of our own internal docudramas and we veil everyone else in swatches of black or white, a good versus evil schema prevails. A person is also understandably self-conscious about writing about true emotions. It is a tall task by anyone’s standards to share their unsavory thoughts with strangers, much less family members, and friends.

A novel is a storyline with an antagonist and protagonist, a plot, conflict, and resolution. A memoir is a slice of life. An autobiography is limited to the facts set out in chronological order. When left in the hands of a deft writer a short story is a literature delicacy, a delectable dish comparable to eating a spoonful of chocolate mousse. An essay, in contrast, shows an energetic mind at work. Each essayist employs the prose style and technique that best fits the writer’s climactic meanderings. Personal essays are malleable in form; they contain a blend of memoir, observation, speculation, and opinion.

The writer of history, I believe, has a number of duties vis-à-vis the reader, if he wants to keep him reading. The first is to distill. He must do the preliminary work for the reader, assemble the information, make sense of it, select the essential, discard the irrelevant- above all, discard the irrelevant - and put the rest together so that it forms a developing dramatic narrative. Narrative, it has been said , is the lifeblood of history. To offer a mass of undigested facts, of names not identified and places not located, is of no use to the reader and is simple laziness on the part of the author, or pedantry to show how much he has read.

Ever since I first read Midori Snyder’s essay, ‘The Armless Maiden and the Hero’s Journey’ in The Journal of Mythic Arts, I couldn’t stop thinking about that particular strand of folklore and the application of its powerful themes to the lives of young women. There are many different versions of the tale from around the world, and the ‘Armless Maiden’ or ‘Handless Maiden’ are just two of the more familiar. But whatever the title, we are essentially talking about a narrative that speaks of the power of transformation – and, perhaps more significantly when writing young adult fantasy, the power of the female to transform herself. It’s a rite of passage; something that mirrors the traditional journey from adolescence to adulthood. Common motifs of the stories include – and I am simplifying pretty drastically here – the violent loss of hands or arms for the girl of the title, and their eventual re-growth as she slowly regains her autonomy and independence. In many accounts there is a halfway point in the story where a magician builds a temporary replacement pair of hands for the girl, magical hands and arms that are usually made entirely of silver. What I find interesting is that this isn’t where the story ends; the gaining of silver hands simply marks the beginning of a whole new test for our heroine.

It seems important to cling to the concrete, to remember that illness is not a metaphor or a study but a phenomenon unfolding in (and on) real bodies in real rooms. Its qualia, the crinkly paper hospital gown and metallic adrenaline taste, the mutable and inexpressible shades of pain, demand articulation because they matter. We work so hard at telling others what it is like to be sick in whichever particular way we are sick; we are reassured to hear that our particulars fit within larger known narratives of illness. With sickness as with anything else, communicating what it is like so others can know, or understanding others in precisely the way they wish we could, is next to impossible. We try anyway.

A pensive personal essay or any other form of narrative nonfiction presents a writer’s viewpoint either as a participant or as a meticulous observer. As a voluble eyewitness, the autobiographer serves as a historian. A writer’s comments will also reflect his view of society and prevailing cultural trends. Each writer whom bases a story on his or her personal feelings is unable to serve as an unbiased historian. Writing about personal feelings and documenting firsthand experiences does not require a person to divorce oneself from all prejudices, assumptions, and strained interpretations. Oftentimes what make reading someone’s journalistic writing enjoyable are their bold, cynical, and derisive opinions, colored by congenital biases, laced with ironic or sardonic commentary.

Amy found out she had cancer not long after finishing Textbook, and she called me. She knew that in the years after my book The Fault in Our Stars was published, I’d come to know many young people who were gravely ill, and she wanted to know if I had advice for her. I told her what I think is true—that love survives death. But she wanted to know how young people react to death. How her kids would. She wanted to know if her kids and her husband would be okay, and that ripped me up. Although I’m usually quite comfortable talking with sick people, with my friend I found myself stumbling over words, overwhelmed by my own sadness and worry. They won’t be okay, of course, but they will go on, and the love you poured into them will go on. That’s what I should’ve said. But what I actually said, while crying, was, “How can this be happening? You do so much yoga.” In my experience, dying people often have wonderful stories of the horrible things healthy people say to them, but I’ve never heard of anybody saying something as stupid as, “You do so much yoga.” I hope that Amy at least got some narrative mileage out of it. But I also know I failed her, after she was there for me so many times. I know she forgives me—present tense—but still, I desperately wish I could’ve said something useful. Or perhaps not said anything at all. When people we love are suffering, we want to make it better. But sometimes—often, in fact—you can’t make it better. I’m reminded of something my supervisor said to me when I was a student chaplain: “Don’t just do something. Stand there.

Practical affairs task the human brain throughout the day. At night, the mind takes a deserved hiatus to consider the impossible and the absurd. In the carnage of our nighttime sleep tussles, the colored liqueurs of the true, the possible, fantasy, and the mythic beliefs become intermixed. Eyelets of the commonsensical and the imaginative are incorporated, and a new realism emerges out of our distilled perception of the veridical derived from the phenomenal realm of sensory reality and the philosophic world of ideals contained in the noumenal realm. The resultant psychobiologic vision immerses us in bouts of intoxicating inspiration and artistic stimulation and leaves us rickety boned and weakened after enduring a dreaded hangover of perpetual doubt laced with vagueness and insecurity.

This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no “meaning” beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience. In what would probably be the middle of my life I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical.

That summer when I was feeling very much like Juliet holding the potion, the therapist would tell me, “Just know that those thoughts aren’t you. That’s the OCD, it’s not you.” It was a kind gesture—she was offering me the illness narrative that reigns now, the one that constructs very, very firm boundaries between brain and self, illness and consciousness, self and other. I clung to that for a while, the notion that the maelstrom happening in my brain was not of me but outside me, happening to me. That there was a tidy line dividing “me” from “disease,” and the disease was classifiable as “other.” But then it became difficult to tell whether certain thoughts should go in the me box or the disease box—where did “I want to throw a rock through the kitchen window” belong? Eventually I could no longer avoid the fact that mental illness is not like infection; there’s no outside invader. And if a disease is produced in your body, in your mind, then what is it if not you?

Television’s greatest appeal is that it is engaging without being at all demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving. It’s the same in all low art that has as goal continued attention and patronage: it’s appealing precisely because it’s at once fun and easy. And the entrenchment of a culture built on Appeal helps explain a dark and curious thing: at a time when there are more decent and good and very good serious fiction writers at work in America than ever before, an American public enjoying unprecedented literacy and disposable income spends the vast bulk of its reading time and book dollar on fiction that is, by any fair standard, trash. Trash fiction is, by design and appeal, most like televised narrative: engaging without being demanding. But trash, in terms of both quality and popularity, is a much more sinister phenomenon. For while television has from its beginnings been openly motivated by — has been about—considerations of mass appeal and L.C.D. and profit, our own history is chock-full of evidence that readers and societies may properly expect important, lasting contributions from a narrative art that understands itself as being about considerations more important than popularity and balance sheets. Entertainers can divert and engage and maybe even console; only artists can transfigure. Today’s trash writers are entertainers working artists’ turf. This in itself is nothing new. But television aesthetics, and television-like economics, have clearly made their unprecedented popularity and reward possible. And there seems to me to be a real danger that not only the forms but the norms of televised art will begin to supplant the standards of all narrative art. This would be a disaster. [...] Even the snottiest young artiste, of course, probably isn’t going to bear personal ill will toward writers of trash; just as, while everybody agrees that prostitution is a bad thing for everyone involved, few are apt to blame prostitutes themselves, or wish them harm. If this seems like a non sequitur, I’m going to claim the analogy is all too apt. A prostitute is someone who, in exchange for money, affords someone else the form and sensation of sexual intimacy without any of the complex emotions or responsibilities that make intimacy between two people a valuable or meaningful human enterprise. The prostitute “gives,” but — demanding nothing of comparable value in return — perverts the giving, helps render what is supposed to be a revelation a transaction. The writer of trash fiction, often with admirable craft, affords his customer a narrative structure and movement, and content that engages the reader — titillates, repulses, excites, transports him — without demanding of him any of the intellectual or spiritual or artistic responses that render verbal intercourse between writer and reader an important or even real activity." - from "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young

In one of the notebooks he carried with him, Nietzsche wrote, "We have art lest we perish from the truth." For those leading afterlives, the unadorned facts of what's happened to them can be brutish to bear on their own terms. Contextualizing that hardship through our intellects and imaginations is a critical salve, an act of transforming our perception that can guide and color how we experience our lives. We can knead our experiences into a larger arc, providing the cohesion that helps us form new narrative identities. Or we can look deeper into our afterlives until we ferret out a way of construing them that rouses our spirits or points them toward salvation. In her essay collection The White Album, Joan Didion delivered a pronouncement that was a natural descendants to Nietzsche's line, an admission of how desperately we rely on the subjective fictions we construct: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." Those stories--whether they take the form of redemption narratives, personal parables, or the pearlescent beliefs we kneel before each day like shrines offering eternal grace--can elevate our lives and serve as the vessels of private deliverance.

It’s important to remember that most television is not just entertainment: it’s also narrative. And it’s so true it’s trite that human beings are narrative animals: every culture countenances itself as culture via a story, whether mythopoeic or politico-economic; every whole person understands his lifetime as an organized, recountable series of events and changes with at least a beginning and middle. We need narrative like we need space-time; it’s a built-in thing. In the C.Y. writers today, the narrative patterns to which literate Americans are most regularly exposed are televised. And, even on a charitable account, television is a pretty low type of narrative art. It’s a narrative art that strives not to change or enlighten or broaden or reorient — not necessarily even to “entertain”—but merely and always to engage, to appeal to. Its one end — openly acknowledged — is to ensure continued watching. And (I claim) the metastatic efficiency with which it’s done so has, as cost, inevitable and dire consequences for the level of people’s tastes in narrative art. For the very expectations of readers in virtue of which narrative art is art." - from"Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young

At the risk of oversimplifying a topic that deserves entire books, we can summarize like this: During enslavement, many Black cooks learned their way around kitchens because their lives could depend on having that knowledge and skill. After slavery was abolished, many took to slinging fried chicken (or cooking in general) as one way to make a living. Interestingly, it wasn’t until Black folks began navigating their supposed freedoms-applying to schools, looking for paid work, seeking housing-that cartoonish, offensive images of Black folks eagerly consuming chicken or stealing chickens began to appear in essays, comics, advertisements, and postcards, perpetuating a narrative by white society that Black people were subhuman and needed to be controlled, policed, and locked out of mainstream opportunities. Exacerbated by the deep white resentment of Black people’s increasing social and political mobility (this period saw the largest representation of Black people in Congress than any time since), the idea took root that being Black meant that you loved fried chicken so much that you couldn’t resist it. This narrative is a painful legacy of slavery that wasn’t of our own making and is ironic, given that people all over the world get down with wings and things. But the essence of this stereotype persists. We know folks who refuse to eat fried chicken around white people, or chefs who don’t cook it in their restaurants, because they feel that’s the only thing certain diners expect from them…American fried chicken tastes good. It’s also complicated.

Consequently, of the two main stories which emerged after September 11, both are worse, as Stalin would have put it. The American patriotic narrative – the innocence under siege, the surge of patriotic pride – is, of course, vain; however, is the Leftist narrative (with its Schadenfreude: the USA got what it deserved, what it had been doing to others for decades) really any better? The predominant reaction of European – but also American – Leftists was nothing less than scandalous: all imaginable stupidities were said and written, up to the ‘feminist’ point that the WTC towers were two phallic symbols, waiting to be destroyed (‘castrated’). Was there not something petty and miserable in the mathematics reminding us of Holocaust revisionism (what are the 3,000 dead against millions in Rwanda, Kongo, etc.)? And what about the fact that the CIA (co-)created the Taliban and Bin Laden, financing and helping them to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan? Why was this fact quoted as an argument against attacking them? Would it not be much more logical to claim that it is precisely America’s duty to rid us of the monster it created? The moment we think in the terms of ‘Yes, the WTC collapse was a tragedy, but we should not fully solidarize with the victims, since this would mean supporting US imperialism’, the ethical catastrophe is already here: the only appropriate stance is unconditional solidarity with all victims. The ethical stance proper is replaced here by the moralizing mathematics of guilt and horror, which misses the key point: the terrifying death of each individual is absolute and incomparable.

The thing is, I don't really have any coming-out narratives of my own. I never felt as though anyone was entitles to a red-carpet presentation of who I am and how I identify. When I initially found myself attracted to women in college, for example, I simply showed up at the next family function with my first girlfriend in tow and introduced her as such. I didn't call each family member ahead of time and instruct them to brace themselves, nor did I write lengthy letters detailing the intricacies of my new desires. Likewise, when I'm meeting people for the first time at parties or other social engagements and they post the inevitable, "So what do you do?" I respond as routinely as possible: "Oh, I work in the sex industry. You?" I'm not trying to be provocative; rather, I've always believed that being "out" is the most powerful tool of activism available to disadvantaged minority communities, sex workers included, I find that when you approach a supposedly radical issue (queerness, nonmonogamy, atheism, gender nonconformity) with the same nonchalance as you would a less controversial topic (accounting, marriage, the weather), you give the other party permission to treat it with the same accepting ambivalence. We're pack animals, and we're constantly comparing ourselves to one another. We look for approval from our peers, and in many cases we use their reactions and opinions to help guide our own. I often observe people, who I've just disclosed to, pause to shift their eyes and gauge the receptiveness of those around them before responding. It'd be a fascinating study if it weren't so disheartening.

6.  The novel makes reference to a real book from literary history. Mary Rowlandson’s seventeenth-century narrative of being held captive by Native Americans has been called America’s first bestseller. Go to the library or online to learn more about Rowlandson, her experience, and her publication. Then, write a short essay explaining why you think Brandon Sanderson chose to feature this particular historical work in The Rithmatist.

Lost and afraid in a crowd of our own alienated facets turned other, we create a cultural narrative of pure projection to try to impose some order onto the chaos

The sum of all spaces can only be read by one man who is many men, but it could only be written by one writer who was all writers, and his work . . . could only be one work: one vast narrative in which space has been seen and defeated.

I will use narrative writing to explore the past, analyze the present, and speculate upon the future. I will studiously attempt to slay my ego and re-write my sense of self into a benign creature that reflects the worthy character traits of a beloved tortoise.

While Tufte’s essay wasn’t the sole impetus behind the move to narratives, it crystallized our thinking.

It should be clear that this was a list made by someone who prized control, yearned after momentum, someone determined to play her role as if she had the script, heard her cues, knew the narrative.

As to treatment, I believe that the material must precede the thesis, that chronological narrative is the spine and the blood stream that bring history closer to “how it really was” and to a proper understanding of cause and effect; that, whatever the subject, it must be written in terms of what was known and believed at the time, not from the perspective of hindsight, for otherwise the result will be invalid. While laying no claim to originality, these are principles I discovered for myself in the course of learning the craft and following the practice of my profession.

Often, it feels like so many of us who are considered “other” don’t have narrative or political value beyond the worst parts of our lives. But I know that we are more than that. I know that we can choose to share what is hard or choose to share some piece of our joy and hope, and the work is worthy either way.

When women are laughing, we're not telling jokes—we're telling stories. We're talking about what happened to us that day. Our lives are a riot.

Telling a funny story doesn't diminish the significance of the event, but instead changes the script. The fear of being laughed at becomes precisely what makes others laugh. You're the narrator and you have control over it. It becomes your story as opposed to something that happened.

War is a narrative: it might almost be said to embody the narrative principle itself. It is the attempt to create a story of life, to create agreement. In war, there is no point of view; war is the end of point of view, where violence is welcomed as the final means of arriving at a common version of events.

other human catastrophes can bear the weight of human narrative—war, kidnapping, death—but schizophrenia’s built-in chaos resists sense.

The Scriptures reveal an unfolding story in four parts: Creation, Fall, Redemption, and Restoration. Each part is essential to the entire plot and each part propels the story onward to its appointed end. As human beings we live in and take part in this drama, for blessing or for curse. It can be no other way, for this is the story of history, the narrative of reality, not a matter of choice. No one can say one day, “I think from now on I’ll live outside the story.” There is no outside for those who are called into existence by the word of God. God, as author and sustainer of the story who knows the end from the beginning and dwells in the eternal now, is outside.

Ours was the one-eyed pacifism that is peculiar to sheltered countries with strong navies.

Skin was earth; it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit in the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden. I

Skin was earth; it was soil. I could see, even on my own skin, the joined trapezoids of dust specks God had wetted and stuck with his spit in the morning he made Adam from dirt. Now, all these generations later, we people could still see on our skin the inherited prints of the dust specks of Eden.

But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days.

In a world crowded with the white noise of other people's narratives -- the collective narrative of social media; the multi-strand narratives of binge TV -- having your own, singular, internal narrative is nothing short of essential.

and a system of weights and measures that is intelligible only to the compilers of arithmetic books, to see how little they care about mere efficiency. But

its retrospection draws attention to the prospective need for life to take on a different form, down to its everyday details, so that the temporal crisis can be averted. It will not mourn the passing of the time of storytelling. The end of narration, the end of history, does not need to bring about a temporal emptiness.

The opening pages of the Bible reveal that human creativity and culture are rooted in creation. This means they are good gifts of God, an expression of his image in humankind, and pleasing to him. In the creation narrative we find the essential kernels of human creativity that have blossomed into science (Gen. 2:19–20), practical skills and crafts of all types (Gen. 2:15), and the arts (Gen. 2:23). Culture, creativity and art are not to be dismissed, disdained, or relegated to insignificance by God’s people because they are essential to the Creator’s plan for us, his creatures. After God had called all things into existence he determined what he had made was “very good” (Gen. 1:31). Christians may mean well when they look down on physical things as “less spiritual,” but in doing so they are substituting their own evaluation for God’s. Seen in this light, the sacred/secular dichotomy brings us perilously close to the sin of blasphemy.

If we want to know a culture then we need to listen carefully to its stories. And since all human narratives take place within the more grounded biblical story of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration, good human stories tend to follow the same pattern.

A lot of the homophobia in Black communities here and abroad can be traced to the contributions from white Evangelicals. Black people get a bad rap because of who is often in control of the narrative.

any attempt at narrative can give value to an experience which might otherwise evaporate away.

It is NOT unfair, it is just LIFE,” she said, squeezing my arm emphatically on the words “NOT” and “LIFE.” “It is sad and ridiculous, and it is amazing and to be celebrated. That is it. Your expectation that anything is ever untinged by something else is an extremely dodgy narrative to cling to. Let it be messy and painful, let it be joyful and rare. What’s the point of life being a multifaceted experience if you keep saying your happiness is contingent on it only ever being one thing—that happiness can only ever have happiness in it. That’s just balls—it’s impossible, and would be very boring, it would really be just utter, utter balls.” She put her hand on my cheek and smoothed away some leaking tears. “For goodness sake,” she said loudly but not unkindly, “happy, sad—let it be both.

In the same way that Firestone’s embrace of scientific and technological progress as manifest destiny tips its hat to Marx and Engels, so also it resembles (perhaps even more closely) the Marxist-inspired biofuturism of the interwar period, particularly in Britain, in the work of writers such as H. G. Wells, J. B. S. Haldane, J. D. Bernal, Julian Huxley, Conrad Waddington, and their contemporaries (including Gregory Bateson and Joseph Needham, the latter of whose embryological interests led to his enduring fascination with the history of technology in China). Interestingly, it is also in these early twentieth century writings that ideas about artificial reproduction, cybernation, space travel, genetic modification, and ectogenesis abound. As cultural theorist Susan Squier has demonstrated, debates about ectogenesis were crucial to both the scientific ambitions and futuristic narratives of many of the United Kingdom’s most eminent biologists from the 1920s and the 1930s onward. As John Burdon Sanderson (“Jack”) Haldane speculated in his famous 1923 paper “Daedalus, or Science and the Future” (originally read to the Heretics society in Cambridge) ectogenesis could provide a more efficient and rational basis for human reproduction in the future: [W]e can take an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum each month, of which 90 per cent can be fertilized, and the embryos grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the air.

Griffin’s narrative, by contrast, seems more steeped in indignities. Some of the scenes he endures are stomach-turning: being shooed away from white restaurants, as if his race will taint the food; hearing from Blacks about the difficulty of taking even brief trips away from home due to the scarcity of “coloured” bathrooms and drinking fountains, effectively confining them to their own neighbourhoods; being constantly questioned by white men about his sexual prowess and where they themselves could find loose Black women. Most painful to Griffin is what he refers to as the “hate stare.” He writes: “Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it terrifies you.” It is this, beyond everything, that starts to get to him: not racism’s physical threats, but the way it distorts the mind and dehumanizes everyone it touches, both the hated and the one who hates.

In short, why am I not regarded by the law as a soul, responsible for my acts to God and humanity, and not as a mere body, devoted to the unreasoning service of my husband?" The state gives no answer, and the champions of her policy evince wisdom in imitating her silence.

Marxist, feminist, and statist education in our day is universally programmed to read all great works as externally imposed class and gender warfare diatribes that subvert everything wholesome and wondrous that might exist within them. And should you happen upon a male professor who isn’t a feminist/Marxist, you likely found he was an atheist materialist who scoffed at anything in the work beyond his feeble grasp.

I think that Franco-American writers interact with this narrative by signifying their ethnic identity in class terms. Alan Bérubé in his autobiographical essay, “Intellectual Desire” finds his father’s ethnic agency in the active identification with a working class status: “my father was offered a low-level management position at work, which he turned down… But there was more to his refusal than class panic over becoming ‘one of them.’’ The distance he had traveled – away from his French working-class family, their farm, their land – was now so far from where he’d started that he began to lose the ground beneath his feet. He wanted to go home”). In many Franco-American texts, ethnic identity is signified through the intentional identification with a working class status; the refusal of upward mobility signifies an active embrace of an ethnic past and creation of an ethnic present. As a literary scholar, I focus on the way these issues are explored in literature, and I believe that literature offers insight into the interplay between the social and the personal not available through other means.

For Aristotle, fourth-century BCE Greek philosopher, the starting point of wisdom, or philosophy, was metaphysics. Modernity, in its quest for self-destruction, has more or less rejected metaphysics. But metaphysics will never go away because metaphysics is reality itself—the study of the totality of what is. Metaphysics is the starting point in terms of actual foundations of knowledge and presupposition, yet it comes at the end of the process of pedagogy, as it is the highest science. Nowadays, aside from certain continental philosophers who follow in the train of genius writers like nineteenth/twentieth-century German philosopher mathematician Edmund Husserl, theoria and metaphysics have been jettisoned for pragmatism, postmodernism, and other forms of self-destructive prattle. [...] Unfortunately, certain basic flaws in Aristotle’s own position led to that decline, particularly his adoption of empiricism. Aristotle cut the world off from the possibility of any other world or reality or dimension, and while it took a millennium or two, this ultimately resulted in materialism, positivism, and finally the negation of all meaning and purpose.

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But the molt interesting part of this doctrine, is the combustion of the human body, produced by the long and immoderate use of spirituous liquors. Such cases are on record; and a collection of them, with remarks, is to be found in the Journal de Physic, year 8, by Pierre Aime Lair. I subjoin a copy of that memoir, taken from the Philosophical Magazine, vol. vi. p. 132. by Mr. Alexander Tilloch. It is in vain to request implicit faith to this narrative. The testimony on which the whole cases are given, seems nearly alike. But in the present state of chemistry, and what we know of the nature of spirituous liquors, it does not appear beyond credibility, that from their long and excessive use, such a quantity of hydrogen might accumulate in the body, as to sustain the combustion of it.

Narratives about certain experiences are somehow legitimized when mediated through a man’s perspective. Consider the work of John Updike or Richard Yates. Most of their fiction is grounded in domestic themes that, in the hands of a woman, would render the work “women’s fiction.” While these books may be tagged as “women’s fiction” on Amazon.com, they are also categorized as literary fiction. These books are allowed to be more than what they are by virtue of the writer’s gender, while similar books by women are forced to be less than what they are, forced into narrow, often inaccurate categories that diminish their contents. James

The seven bad-humored and unfunny devils who eat ourselves and our narratives alive are Pretentiousness, Pomposity, Presumption, Pontificality, Pavoninity or Peacockery, Pornography, and Pride, these seven offenses to all life. They have oozed out from under the iron doors and then they have inflated themselves immeasurably.

Some workshop professors will say you can write the same essay a hundred times because there's no such thing as a single objective narrative in real life. Truth doesn't come in shades so much as numerous specks of one indisputable, collective experience that no one has the distance to see.

Usually it is a bit of a trick to keep your knowledge from blinding you.

All those things for which we have no words are lost.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf.

In New Orleans—if you could get to New Orleans—would the music be loud enough?

He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write. He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know.

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened, and its deepest mystery probed?

Las historias, llevadas a término, son exploraciones de los límites de la legitimidad.

Equiano, one of the luckiest among them, acquired an education, freed himself, and wrote a book in 1789: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself. He preceded his European slave name by his original Igbo name and affirmed his African identity, waving it like a banner in the wind.

What limpid lakes and cool date palms may our caravans have passed untried? Until, one by one, by the blindest of leaps, we light on the road to these places, we must stumble in darkness and hunger.

Writers’ never-ending quest involves investigating genuineness while carving out narrative nonfiction. They must strive to reach great truths by recounting untold lies with acute enthusiasm. Culmination of a sprawling personal saga is an attempt to flesh out from the ichors of a person’s reptilian instincts and mammalian brain patterns the epicene embodiment of the originator’s dream works intermingled with their actual remembered sensory observations. One unleashes their cache of blood-tinged memories along with an X-ray beam of reminiscent enlightenment to forge a flowing stream of self-consciousness dedicated to the task of hunting out a new way of perceiving, thinking, and communicating.

Hemingway studied, as models, the novels of Knut Hamsun and Ivan Turgenev. Isaac Bashevis Singer, as it happened, also chose Hamsun and Turgenev as models. Ralph Ellison studied Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Thoreau loved Homer; Eudora Welty loved Chekhov. Faulkner described his debt to Sherwood Anderson and Joyce; E. M. Forster, his debt to Jane Austen and Proust. By contrast, if you ask a twenty-one-year-old poet whose poetry he likes, he might say, unblushing, “Nobody’s.” In his youth, he has not yet understood that poets like poetry, and novelists like novels; he himself likes only the role, the thought of himself in a hat. Rembrandt and Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Gauguin, possessed, I believe, powerful hearts, not powerful wills. They loved the range of material they used, the work’s possibilities excited them; the field’s complexities fired their imaginations. The caring suggested the tasks; the tasks suggested the schedules. They learned their fields and then loved them. They worked, respectfully, out of their love and knowledge, and they produced complex bodies of work that endure. Then, and only then, the world maybe flapped at them some sort of hat, which, if they were still living, they ignored as well as they could, to keep at their tasks.

All those things for which we have no words are lost. The mind—the culture—has two little tools, grammar and lexicon: a decorated sand bucket and a matching shovel. With these we bluster about the continents and do all the world’s work. With these we try to save our very lives.

Unlike uplifting light fiction, narrative nonfiction’s trammeled territory provides no safe room where an unnerved writer can banish their unpleasant memories. Narrative nonfiction must make use of our sour feelings, pungent memories, gloomy thoughts, and other indigestible nougats of a black disposition. Given a choice between experiencing nothing and inconsolable grief, the writer will always take the epic grief that composes the grandeur of human tragedy. Without a mask of consolation to shunt the unseemly undercurrent that disturbs them, writers whom dabble in memoir or personal essay writing must swallow hard and make use of the entire range of their toxic temperament. The tonicity of narrative nonfiction need not be bleak, but it must be true to the full panoply of both positive and negative emotions that heave through the writer’s torrid veins.

The universe has continued to deal in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down eons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder and the whole world sparks and flames.

Most of us have complicated backstories, messy histories, multiple narratives. It was a high-wire strategy, for Obama, this invocation of our collective human messiness. His enemies latched on to its imprecision, emphasizing the exotic, un-American nature of Dream City, this ill-defined place where you could be from Hawaii and Kenya, Kansas and Indonesia all at the same time, where you could jive talk like a street hustler and orate like a senator.

As fantasists, as fiction writers, we sell fantasy. I get that. But fantasy is not bodies. It’s stories. What we sell does not have to be in service to a narrative of objectification. I

I read the stories I've been told in my own way and make a narrative of them. Narrative is a chain of links, and I link furiously, merrily hurdling over holes, gaps, and secrets. Nevertheless, I try to remind myself that the holes are there. They are always there, not only in the lives of others but in my own life as well.

The story ‘Good Old Neon’ invokes two conundrums from mathematical logic, the Berry and Russell paradoxes, to describe a psychological double bind that the narrator calls the ‘fraudulence paradox.

I never saw a tree,” Dillard declares, in a valuable piece of advice to writers of any and every stripe, “that was no tree in particular.

Now I ask you to consider writing from the inside, to convince yourself of your characters' dimensions before you attempt to narrate around them or explain them. We always misstep when we consider our writing of a story as a separate action from the story itself ... Characters would find the suggestion that they are in a story ridiculous and insulting; when writing is truly working, both writer and reader would share this sense of insult, and resent the interruption.

I wish I had devoted all of my time writing to literature. Those essays in the 60's, they were insolent, you know, like a young persons work. I wouldn't mind if the essays, at some point, evaporated. I think fiction .. I think literature .. I think narrative, is what lasts. I do believe that there is such a thing as truth. But I prefer the mode in which truth appears in art or literature. In literature a truth is something who's opposite is also true.

Every fundamentalism focuses on end times, and Armageddon is, in a sense, a rhetorical trope, an emphatic and overwhelming conclusion, meant to wrap up and make tidy the mistaken wanderings of history. For a fundamentalist the end is one of the forms desire takes, a passion no different from lust or avarice, intense with longing and the need for fulfillment and relief. It’s like they’re horny for apocalypse. They get off on denouements, which partly explains why Hell House never amounted to much more than a series of murderous conclusions. It focused only on that part of a story where life finds itself fated. Inside every act a judgement was coiled. Real people with their ragged and uncertain lives, their stumbling desires, their bleak or blessed futures, would only break into the narrative, complicating the story, dragging it on endlessly.

And so a character named Red Devil seemed a proxy voice, speaking for everybody, when he would cackle hysterically and yell out, “Manteno, 1963. I’m history!” Manteno was the state mental hospital but nothing beyond that was elaborated. To be history in America doesn’t mean to be recorded, noted, added to the narrative, but precisely the opposite, to be gone, banished, left behind. To be history is to be cut from the story.

The best approach is to write a narrative, “slice of life” essay where you focus on a smaller incident, event or moment, and then expand the essay to share what you learned from it.

We live in a confused time, with democracy in apparent decline and with the church and Christian consciences increasingly at risk from governments, in various parts of the globe, that, having made a mess of almost everything else, decide to distract attention by stirring up anti-Christian sentiment and passing laws designed to make life difficult for those who want to be faithful followers of Jesus Christ. This is where faithfulness, loyalty, and trustworthiness will stand out, where that fourth meaning of rrionc is needed over against the shrinkage of "faith" to merely "my personal belief." The rhetoric of the Enlightenment has been extremely keen to squash "faith" into "private, personal belief," so that it can then insist that such "faith" should stay as a private matter and not leak out to infect the wider world. But since the Christian's personal belief is in the creator God who raised Jesus from the dead, this personal belief can never remain only a personal belief but, rooted in the trust that is the first meaning of rricrts, must grow at once into the loyalty, the public trustworthiness, that is the fourth meaning. This too is part of the virtue of "faith": to take the thousand small decisions to be loyal, even in public, even when it is dangerous or difficult, and so to acquire the habit of confessing this faith (sense 3) both when it is safe and when it is dangerous. Just as Mother Teresa spoke of recognizing Jesus in the Eucharist and then going out to recognize him in the poor and needy, so we need to learn the virtue of affirming our faith in our liturgical and prayer life so that we can then go out and affirm it on the street, in public debate, in pursuit of that freedom for which the second-century apologists argued. Christian faith, then, does indeed belong among the virtues. But we can only understand that in the light of the full biblical and eschatological narrative, in which God's eventual new creation, launched in Jesus' resurrection, will make all things new. Christian faith looks back to Jesus, and on to that eventual new day. It tastes in advance, in personal and public life, the freedom that we already have through Jesus and that one day we shall have in all its fullness. The practice of this "faith" is, on the one hand, the steady, grace-given entering into the habit by which our character is formed, a habit correlated with those resulting from the similar practice of hope and love. On the other hand, the practice of this faith is the genuine anticipation in the present of that trust, belief, and faithfulness that are part of the telos, the goal. That goal, already given in Jesus Christ, is the destination toward which we are now journeying in the power of the Spirit. Virtue is one of the things that happen in between, and because of, that gift and that goal.

As in many colonialist fictions, white women in The Jewel in the Crown voice a liberal critique of empire and are in part to blame for its decline. Because of their social marginality and because, when they do anything, they do harm, the only honourable position for them, the only really white position, is that of doing nothing. Because they are creatures of conscience this is a source of agony. Yet it is an exquisite agony, stretched out over fifteen languid hours. It bears witness to the greater sensitivity of women and other marginals. It even suggests that there may be an Oriental holiness to be derived from helpless inaction. Women take the blame, and provide the spectacle of moral suffering, for the loss of empire. For this they are rewarded with a possibility that already matches their condition of narrative existence: nothing.

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especially in the Christian cult (wine and bread on the altar-tomb as the mystical body of Him Who Was Crucified, Who died and Who was resurrected; the sacrament of new life and resurrection through food and drink). In the cultic redaction all elements of the complex appear not in a real but in a sublimated form, and are linked with one another not via a real-life narrative, but through mystic-symbolic links and interrelationships, and the triumph of life over death (resurrection) is accomplished not on a real and earthly plane but on a mystical one.

The novel, by contrast, dramatizes the gaps that always exist between what is told and the telling of it, constantly experimenting with social, discursive and narrative asymmetries (the formal teratology that led Henry James to call them "fluid puddings").

The analytical framework of this comprehensive field study of what it means to be an American examines how a person’s personality, culture, technology, occupational and recreational activities affect a person’s sense of purposefulness and happiness. The text evaluates the nature of human existence, formation of human social relations, and methods of communication from various philosophic and cultural perspectives. The ultimate goal is to employ the author’s own mind and personal experiences as a filter to quantify what it means to live and die as a thinking and reflective person.

Feeling lost is actually a sign you’re becoming more present in your life—you’re living less within the narratives and ideas that you premeditated and more in the moment at hand. Until you’re used to this, it will feel as though you’re off-track (you aren’t).

The conversations always centered around achievement rather than overcoming. In what I would later realize was a stunning bit of narrative alchemy, my parents taught us black history lessons that weren't remarkable because of all the oppression they involved but because of the extraordinariness of the black people at their center. This would prove to be dramatically different from the rest of reality, which is, let's be honest, an oppression-fest.

There are so many ways through narrative myth and the validation of social media to reassure ourselves that we are doing things right that has meant the concept of rightness has been shon of any meaning. It has become mere lip service. Rather living the right life means being in a state of questioning. It involves self-sacrifice. Making choices should not be risk free, if they are then we are not considering the right options. We have to be ok with giving up capital, social capital, online capital and actual capital. And only then we can figure out how to be right. These is a socratic saying: she who is not contented with what she has would not be contented with what she would like to have.

Hestia’s dearth of myth is often treated in a rather trivializing fashion as a function of her sphere of activity in the home, but this hardly follows. Rather, if we have an appreciation for the ontological status of mythic narrative, as that eternal activity of the Gods which brings about the intellective articulation of the cosmos, then Hestia’s minimal engagement in myth would pertain to her carrying forward into the successive stages of cosmogony the specific Kronian potency of self-identity, insofar as this is a property diminished through the establishment of many particular relationships, relations which determine who someone is for this one and for that one.

A cornerstone of 'hustle culture' is that you should be narrating your career on social media - so that you are doing and performing your job at the same time. I am struck by this revelation every time I tweet about a new podcast episode, or an article I wrote. It is easy enough to make my work visible, but many jobs 'are about "thinking" and there's no visible product that comes from thinking', notes Derek Thompson. Making work out of the work can drain what you find fulfilling about your job in the first place. 'Having to externalise your whole life inherently takes away from the things that are scientifically made to make us happy,' as Thompson states.

So much of our inner turmoil is the result of conducting a life we don’t inherently desire, only because we have accepted an inner narrative of “normal” and “ideal” without ever realizing

The UDC’s monument campaigns were always supported by a narrative that Confederate veterans fought nobly and that defeat did not erase the justness of their cause. These monuments also reflected the beliefs held by the Jim Crow generation—whites who regarded African Americans as second-class citizens and whose leaders sought to preserve the racial status quo through both legal and extralegal means. And if there were any doubts about the larger meaning and purpose of Confederate monuments within the context of the Lost Cause, the Daughters made it clear in the minutes of their meetings, in the essays they wrote, in the speeches they gave, and in the actions they took. Moreover, the men they selected to give speeches at monument unveilings or on Confederate Memorial Day, as they reiterated the message of honor and sacrifice, also furthered the Lost Cause narrative about slavery, the war, and Confederate soldiers as valiant heroes who not only fought to defend the South against an invading North but who withstood Reconstruction and became stalwart defenders of white supremacy, sometimes as members of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Gods, on the other hand, recover their wholeness or autarchy from within the problematic justice of the narrative “state” through the art of esoteric exegesis. In the city of guardians as framed by Socrates, the place of exegete is held by Delphic Apollo, “who, seated at the centre and upon the navel of the earth, delivers his interpretation

Most humans who were ever alive lived inside a single culture that had not changed for hundreds of thousands of years.