The Most Human Art

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Aware of time passing, however, we mourn things passing away, and we often fear the shape of things to come. Hence our need for the eighth power of stories, which is to help us deal with suffering, loss, and death. From the Psalms to the Sunday comics, many tales comfort the fearful and the grieving; they show the weak triumphing over the strong, love winning out over hatred, laughter defying misery. It is easy to dismiss this hopefulness as escapism, but as Italo Calvino reminds us, 'For a prisoner, to escape has always been a good thing, and an individual escape can be a first necessary step toward a collective escape.'

Those who have walked through the valley of the shadow of death, tell stories as a way of fending off despair. Thus Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tells of surviving the Soviet gulag; Toni Morrison recounts the anguish of plantation life; Black Elk tells about the slaughter of the buffalo, the loss of his Lakota homeland.Those of us who have not lived through horrors must still face losing all that we love, including our own lives. Stories reek of our obsession with mortality. As the most enchanting first line of a tale is 'once upon a time,' so the most comforting last line is 'and they lived happily ever after.' This fairy tale formula expresses a deep longing not only for happiness, but also for ever-afterness, for an assurance that life as well as happiness will endure, that it will survive all challenges, perhaps even the grave. We feel the force of that longing, whether or not we believe that it can ever be fulfilled.

The ninth item on my list is really a summation of all that I have said thus far: Stories teach us how to be human. We are creatures of instinct, but not solely of instinct. More than any other animal, we must learn how to behave. In this perennial effort, as Ursula Le Guin says, 'Story is our nearest and dearest way of understanding our lives and finding our way onward.' Skill is knowing how to do something; wisdom is knowing when and why to do it, or to refrain from doing it. While stories may display skill aplenty, in technique or character or plot, what the best of them offer is wisdom. They hold a living reservoir of human possibilities, telling us what has worked before, what has failed, where meaning and purpose and joy might be found. At the heart of many tales is a test, a riddle, a problem to solve; and that, surely, is the condition of our lives, both in detail -- as we decide how to act in the present moment -- and in general, as we seek to understand what it all means. Like so many characters, we are lost in a dark wood, a labyrinth, a swamp, and we need a trail of stories to show us the way back to our true home.

Our ultimate home is the Creation, and anyone who pretends to comprehend this vast and intricate abode is either a lunatic or a liar. In spite of all that we have learned through millennia of inquiry, we still dwell in mystery. Why there is a universe, why we are here, why there is life or consciousness at all, where if anywhere the whole show is headed -- these are questions for which we have no final answers. Not even the wisest of tales can tell us. The wisest, in fact, acknowledge the wonder and mystery of Creation -- and that is the tenth power of stories.

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