Читать книгу LifeLines - Malcolm Doney - Страница 26

17

Trade stories

Our lives are shaped by stories. They’re stories in themselves. When we meet someone new we begin by telling them our story: where we come from, who our parents were, where we went to school... what happened on the next page, the next chapter. We’re all storytellers.

Our nations and tribes, our faith traditions and families are built on stories. Defining myths, victories, defeats, parables, folktales, anecdotes – history, herstory.

Some of the tales we tell are rooted in actuality, others are embroidered. Some are made up from scratch. But – fact, fiction or faction – they’re often ‘true’. Before modernity and fundamentalism burdened us with an obsession with fact and literalism, people would seldom ask of a story: ‘Did it happen?’ Instead they’d ask: ‘Is it true?’ They sensed that, in the words of poet Mary Oliver, ‘they won’t be false, and they won’t be true but they’ll be real’.¹

Flannery O’Connor put it perfectly: ‘I’m always highly irritated,’ she said, ‘by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality – it’s a plunge into reality.’²

That’s why humankind has always told tales. ‘After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world,’ says Philip Pullman.³ Stories are how we articulate our values, longings and anxieties – how we pass on what’s important to our children. ‘Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceivable,’ says writer Melanie Tem. ‘Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth.’⁴

Stories give us room to grow. C. S. Lewis, whose The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe continues to capture the imaginations of new generations of children, put it like this:

We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. Each of us by nature sees the whole world from one point of view with a perspective and a selectiveness peculiar to ourselves... we want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own... We demand windows... my own eyes are not enough for me. I will see through the eyes of others.⁵

Sharing our own lived experiences, trading stories with one another, is a way of revealing that there are new possibilities, alternative narratives. Another way to travel, as Jeanette Winterson says: ‘True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier...’⁶