A common man marvels at uncommon things. A wise man marvels at the commonplace. CONFUCIUS

Monday 21 January 2013

Our Personal Narratives


A great short essay by Frank Bures in Poets & Writers magazine: The Secret Lives Of Stories: Rewriting Our Personal Narratives.

3 comments:

Ruth said...

I think the most powerful segment of this piece was about the four-year-old's questions, and his conclusion about them. But the rest is also very meaningful. Inge and I always talk about memory, and why we remember certain things. This makes so much sense, where he gets to in the end.

Loren said...

Powerful essay.

I've bookmarked it to re-read later, and there's far too much out there to read much of it twice.

The Solitary Walker said...

Yes, I agree. It's a well written and insightful piece. And though a lot of the stuff is not new, he makes you want to go on, explore further: e.g. causality — what about 'false' causality, when things seem to go wrong from a 'false' premise, but one that was accepted at the time? And how many of our narratives are based on 'actual' causality and how much on a fictive or imagined 'causality'? What really is cause and effect? It certainly ain't the scientific, physical, demonstrable version in most of our lives, it's something far more amorphous and mysterious... It can tie the mind in knots thinking about this..!