The+Role+of+Stories

=The Role of Stories=

1. History is based on individual accounts of events. How are these formed? Keith Ridgway points out here that every account, every "objective eyewitness report", is at bottom a story put together to simplify and give particular meaning to the chaotic flow of events that is experience.

[E]verything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones—they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor—please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience—with our senses and our nerves—is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos.

Keith Ridgway, "Everything is Fiction", The New Yorker, August 8, 2012.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/08/everything-is-fiction.html