It happened long, long ago, when I was very young. Someone told me a story. Was it my mother I heard it from? How did it begin? What happened, and what happened next, and then how did it end? Was it a story about me? Did I imagine that it could have been? Stories are part of our history, and our history is remembered in stories we tell. We never escape them. We tell them and are chronicled within them. We are story-tellers. Story-dwellers.

Here is a simple story: "I walked home and found a dollar in the leaves." If I say only that I walked home, I haven't told a story. Something has to happen. The process must contain an event besides its own end. Walking home isn't enough for a story in itself, but if the woman sitting over there by the window reading a glossy blue-covered book asks me where I went last night after I left her (after we argued) and I answer "I walked home" then that becomes part of the story she is making of what happened last night. I'm not telling a story in saying only that I walked home, but what I've just told her (she smiled, then looked away when I said it) is now part of the story she imagines about last night. But I didn't tell her about finding the dollar in the leaves, and if I had she probably wouldn't have put it in the story she's making. It's not relevant to her concerns, but it's important to me because that's one more dollar that's mine and it makes me happy to have it. We remember with stories and cannot escape the story-making disposition within us.

If I know someone's story, how they lived and how they died, my thinking about their life contains impressions of their death. John F. Kennedy (this is how you say his name when you tell his story, unless you call him JFK) died with chunks of his brain exploding visually from his skull. His hands went up, he pitched back and forward, then he slumped and turned like a sad sad child into his loving Jackie's arms. Everything I know about him is stained by knowing how his story ends. Knowing how a story proceeds affects the way we experience it.

I don't know how my life will end, but I think of my life as a story. My biographical life is an edited version of my life. The original experiences cannot be recovered. The narrative filter through which our memory sifts our experience edits our biography in ways we cannot control. If I talk about my life I'm transforming the memories (some of them seem like pictures somewhere inside me) into sentences. But the experience I talk about wasn't linguistic. So I'm giving you a symbolic substitution of one kind of thing for another. A lot gets lost. Even from what I can remember. The experience is incompletely represented in memory then symbolized with further reduction in language. I'm taking the pictures and non-pictorial memories and then selecting little bits of a larger experience (like how I tripped just before I found the dollar) and telling you about those bits in a severely edited and transmuted form. I can't recreate the experience of my tripping. I can't talk about everything I experienced when I tripped. There's no way you're ever going to know what it was like when I tripped. Even I don't really know, now. But there was the dollar, and I can't even describe how seeing that dollar made me feel.

As I said: "I think of my life as a story." Our beliefs about how a story may proceed affect our experience of it. Sometimes I think my life is going to proceed in one way, sometimes in another. Some days I have very specific ideas about what's going to happen in my life during some moment in the future. That affects how I experience the story I call my life. It makes the present moment seem to mean something that it wouldn't mean if I thought that moment coming up in the future was going to be remarkably different. Some people who die in accidents might spend the moments just before it happens thinking they are going to have a pleasant future, but in fact they're going to die. They completely misconstrued their story.

History is a story we tell about the past. It's just like a big biography about a lot of people at once, i.e. noteworthy collections of people, perhaps institutions, or nations, a race, gender or class. So it has some of the same limitations as a biography about someone who's still alive. As far as the comprehensive story of history goes, we don't know how it's going to turn out. All we know is what's happened so far. But even there, our knowledge is limited by that story-making disposition within us. Quite a lot is left out. Some people believe they know how history will proceed. Some people think we're going to be visited by aliens from another planet and it's all going to be for the best. Some think every class distinction and tumultuous discord is going to be resolved in the future and that greed will be expunged from the human race. Some think that God is going to come and set things straight once and for all. These are all preconstructions of a story that isn't done being told. The story of history can never be complete. Even though we can't know how the story is going to develop we want to know anyway, and so we try to figure it out from what we've made of it so far. If we didn't have this compulsion to make everything into a story we wouldn't be so bothered by not knowing. We think there is a plot to history and that certain moments function like pivotal points in the plot. Our interest in millenium changeovers is an example of this.

"We remember with stories and cannot escape the story-making disposition within us." Everything that is outside my experience is a story someone else has shaped. Not only is it a story, but I had no part in constructing it. My version, if I had experienced the event, might have been significantly different, but this is now beyond me. All I can do is encounter the stories and try to determine how they might relate to what happened before that event was put into the story as it comes to me. The world I seem to know is composed of stories, most of which I had no part in constructing. This is not a convincing prelude to solipsism, but it does lead to a cautious interest in the coherence, meaning, and implications of skepticism.

The stories I hear about other people influence how I think about my own story. I might imagine living the kind of life their story says they have lived. I might then portray myself to others and myself as the sort of character I wish I played in my own story. It is possible in this way to modify who I am or appear to be. Whether I actually become the character I portray is a separate topic. The stories of fictional characters or fictional events as shown in novels, short fiction, poetry, stage plays, radio plays, film, television, opera and other musical forms are available for me, and I may imagine myself within their fictional constructs so far as to actually separate myself psychologically from the otherwise predominant story that is my life. I may find more pleasure in the imagined life available to me through admittedly fictional stories than I do in my physical, day to day life. The truest thing about me might be that I live in other people's stories.

Another reason other people's stories might be more compelling to me than my own is that those stories seem better told (it feels to me) than the way I'm telling my own. They might not only seem more full of the sorts of adventures I wish I experienced myself, but the presumably real characters in those stories might seem more admirable than I imagine I must seem to others. It's beyond doubt that the people did not experience their life in the way I suppose they did when I hear their story. Every factual story is a simplification of the life and events the story is about. As far as I know, this is how this person lived, but the biography is a severely edited version of his life and it makes no sense to suppose everything that's relevant to comparing his life with mine has been included. It is impossible to objectively compare my life to any other life, and no one can fully know what it's like to be me. You may want to know something about me that I'm not telling in my story. The story you want to know isn't the one I want to tell. I might not even know enough to construct the kind of story about myself you want to hear. You might think my life had a particular kind of storyline and I might completely disagree with you. It's possible you will tell my story in a way that I wouldn't even consider a true account of my life.

The stories I hear about history influence how I think about my own story. I place myself (and so my story) within the story of history. If I was present at an event the story of history says was critical to the time in which I lived then I can add to my own story that I was present at that event. It is the story of history that tells me my being there may be significant. If history said nothing about it, it still might be significant to me.

Our lives are shaped by the stories we tell about ourselves. Much of what we feel we know about our lives and the world about us is created by the stories others have told us. This transformation of experience into narrative form is unavoidable. We remember with stories and cannot escape the story-making disposition within us. We seek to discover the plot of our lives and perhaps modify our actions according to the kind of plot we imagine ourselves within. We look to the past to understand the present, and project our storylines into the future to predict what lies ahead. But it's our plot-making nature that's behind this urge for a comprehensive, meaning-filled overview. There is no story. There is only life.

And that's the story on that.