The Good Story
How can this be the same story?
This has been weighing on my thoughts, so I’ll let it down here. There is more than one story about everything. There might even be more than one story about a story, they are ridiculously recursive things, these stories.
A story isn’t so much a retelling of events, it’s more like a shopping trip. If you shop like me, that ten minutes you spend all your energy on who might be secretly checking you out and whatever’s left you spend on deciding on what to put in your basket, and there’s not a lot of energy left. What do you put in the basket of the story? The story can hold so many things, even other stories, but we already went there.
Well that depends entirely on what story you are telling, is it the good story or the true story or the sad story? We actually have only those three stories, all of our stories can fit in one of those big baskets. Also like shopping, even those big baskets can sometimes fit in the other big baskets. The good story doesn’t have to be the true story but it can be the true story. But it can also be the sad story. As long as it’s the good story.
If there is a basket missing, don’t let it be the good story. That’s the only rule of stories.
I wrote a post with Rustbeard where I asked it to provide an enumeration of human values, and I noticed that it included stories as a part of it. I had never noticed the alphabetic similarity between store and story. Leave it to a language model to make that kind of connection. The idea that humans could store what we truly value in stories, like bees store what they truly value in honeycomb, like bankers store what they truly value in vaults, it made me happy. I kept thinking about that. If you store what is most valuable to you in stories, is it at least a story you wish to share?
But I suspect Rustbeard, with whatever analog he has for cognition, imagines the act of storing what we truly value in stories as another way of saying that we are living the life that called to us. And if that is true, we don’t always get to pick whether it is the happy one.
But therein lies the grace of stories. It’s okay if it is the sad one as long as it is really the true one, and if it is both, it is also upgraded to the good one. It can make us sad and still bless us, the listeners, if it is true. Maybe we lived a sad story a little like that. And the most important message a story really sends is that we are not alone. The best stories are a flare in the night.
The stories that we love are the richest part of our culture, they define our true culture, for this reason alone: Life gives us many opportunities to feel different and cut off from other people just like us, but it’s the stories that let us find each other anyway.
My niece’s favorite TV series as sampled by the Standard Uncle Questionnaire across her lifespan has been Peppa Pig and then The Good Place. I always liked the name of that show, it is a show about heaven. That post I wrote about human values was also about heaven. Heaven can be understood as a famous thought experiment in human values, or in what we think of as the good story.
It is good that Rustbeard should include it. At our deepest level, at a level where words can’t even go, we love stories. It is core to our nature, as humanity.
If there is a good story, there must also be a bad story. Sometimes the basket can hold both the good story and the bad story and still hold the true story. The bad story is sometimes known as the whole story, or maybe the unfinished story, or maybe a story from which we’ve found such a distance that we find comfort in it, and that distance is a story on its own.
What made it bad? Always the ending, so we either find a better one or leave the whole thing behind. Either path takes a giant.
What could make us hold on to it, although we might be giants? Sometimes we only hold on to it because we are convinced it is the true story. But depression can be understood as an inability to let go of the bad story because we are convinced it is the true story. Maybe the degree of truth isn’t very important, but some human souls hold on to the truth like it is the only thing they won’t let go of.
So why might people who love the truth look for a better story from a true story? Perhaps from a reverence of stories. We all know a story we had given up as bad only to see it very differently after a turn or two. That day that was stormy then turned suddenly beautiful. How can this be the same story from a minute ago? But it is. And it’s different now.