The Most Human Art

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This brings me to the third item on my list: Stories help us to see through the eyes of other people. Here my list overlaps with one compiled by Carol Bly, who argues in 'Six Uses of Story' that the foremost gift from stories is 'experience of other.' For the duration of a story, children may sense how it is to be old, and the elderly may recall how it is to be young; men may try on the experiences of women, and women those of men. Through stories, we reach across the rifts not only of gender and age, but also of race and creed, geography and class, even the rifts between species or between enemies.

Folk tales and fables and myths often show humans talking and working with other animals, with trees, with rivers and stones, as if recalling or envisioning a time of easy commerce among all beings. Helpful ducks and cats and frogs, wise dragons, stolid oaks, all have lessons for us in these old tales. Of course no storyteller can literally become hawk or pine, any more than a man can become a woman; we cross those boundaries only imperfectly, through leaps of imagination. 'Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?' Thoreau asks. We come nearer to achieving that miracle in stories than anywhere else.

A fourth power of stories is to show us the consequences of our actions. To act responsibly, we must be able to foresee where our actions might lead; and stories train our sight. They reveal the patterns of human conduct, from motive through action to result. Whether or not a story has a moral purpose, therefore, it cannot help but have a moral effect, for better or worse.

An Apache elder, quoted by the anthropologist Keith Basso, puts the case directly: 'Stories go to work on you like arrows. Stories make you live right. Stories make you replace yourself.' Stories do work on us, on our minds and hearts, showing us how we might act, who we might become, and why.

So we arrive at a fifth power of stories, which is to educate our desires. Instead of playing on our selfishness and fear, stories can give us images for what is truly worth seeking, worth having, worth doing. I mean here something more than the way fairy tales repeat our familiar longings. I mean the way Huckleberry Finn makes us want to be faithful, the way Walden makes us yearn to confront the essential facts of life. What stories at their best can do is lead our desires in new directions -- away from greed, toward generosity; away from suspicion, toward sympathy; away from an obsession with material goods, toward a concern for spiritual goods. One of the spiritual goods I cherish is the peace of being at home, in family and neighborhood and community and landscape. Much of what I know about becoming intimate with one's home ground I have learned from reading the testaments of individuals who have decided to stay put. The short list of my teachers would include Lao-tzu and Thoreau and Faulkner, Thomas Merton, Black Elk, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Gary Snyder, and Wendell Berry. Their work exemplifies the sixth power of stories, which is to help us dwell in place.

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