"We tell ourselves stories in order to live"
But it's about Calvino, not Didion
“Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”
Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler
This newsletter has always alleged to be about romance. Its descriptor (did you ever read it, reader?) reads: a love note about sickness or sick note about love, a note about lovesickness or the lovesick, a labor of love for the sick and the lovely.
At the time, I had no idea what it meant to be sick. Sick — the ache after you told him you couldn’t be with him anymore, the listless walks or Bob Dylan song you replayed one thousand times on the bus to the south. The inability to put down a drink or hold down a job. The cold you probably got on the plane (the guy next to you was coughing the whole time). I had no idea. Now someone I love is sick. Never going to get better.
Which is another way of saying, the world spins, everybody goes to work, pays bills, makes a bad coffee, has a bad dream. Has a good dream, forgets for a moment that life ends, that we can’t control or even imagine what comes next, for the ones who go or the ones who stay, and that life, which never purported to be fair but which we somehow projected onto it all the same, is not fair at all.
Anyway, romance is just a way of talking about time, death, life. So if the newsletter is about romance or is not about romance, I don’t care to say. You can say. Anyway, how often we say something is about something when really we’re talking about something else, and how rarely we make a point to realize or correct this point.
Like, for example, Italo Calvino’s book If on a winter’s night a traveler, which purports to be about reading but is actually about romance. Or is about romance but actually about reading. Or may just be about life and death, or may suggest it’s impossible or at least futile to try and organize what anything is actually about anyway.
The novel follows the journey of a man and a woman attempting to read one novel, which turns out to be ten novels, trying to sort out what happened (during publishing or otherwise) that the printing of the first novel was so messed up that they’ve now read ten chapters of ten different novels. What happened was: after the man started reading his book, and got to the second chapter only to discover it was the first chapter, printed over and over again, he went to the bookshop to complain. While there, he meets a woman who has encountered the same problem in the same novel. She reads a lot and he pretends to read a lot in order to see her again, to “discuss” “books.” The two attempt to finish the story, and therein lies the story. A story about finding a story, or making one up.
Which is often what happens when we fall in love, or have love, or love someone or something, anything — we tell ourselves a story. Does the story animate the feeling or does the feeling animate the story?
Text from a dear friend, received May 15th: “God life is so many things.” Then: “We’re all just scraping some meaning from it.”
The challenge being that if you read, watch movies, TV, you anticipate the arc. Life goes down such that it may go up, everything maybe happens for a reason. Or, as one of the “readers” in the final chapter of Calvino’s novel notes: “For a while now, everything has been going wrong for me: it seems to me that in the world there now exist only stories that remain suspended or get lost along the way.”
The story doesn’t require the arc, we do. But in fact, there may not be one. We may require one less than we thought. Some things make no sense. Or they make sense for a moment, a terrifying glimpse of clarity that only makes all the moments that follow make less sense than they originally seemed not to make. Because the “why” for love and the “why” for sickness are the same why, of asking why here, why now, why me — we can answer it with novels, with dreams, stories, films, poems that say “I’m here for this, this is why I’m here.” We can imagine we see. Life may refuse us anyway.