Remember that One Republic song from a dozen years ago? It’s ringing in my head this morning as I read a variety of essays and posts. I’m in the middle of watching the series based on the book Station Eleven, a book I read long before the pandemic started. After it did start, I decided to engage in reading a bunch of pandemic-themed books, dystopian and otherwise, from Saleema Nawaz’s Songs for the End of the World to Daniel Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year. I did make my way through Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, even though it was somewhat endless. I think in reading all these books I was trying to find a throughline, a plot that helped me make sense of what was going on. This newish article suggests that that is just what we need, that it is what good fiction does, whether that is plague fiction or climate change fiction — as the title of the article says, imagining our own extinction may save us by providing an existential life raft that compels us to use our imagination in new ways to respond to the situatioons we find ourselves in.

I believe that stories do that. I think they offer us a fresh way of seeing the world.

I also suspect that our pandemic fatigue and our climate change fatigue and other such fatigues are possibly rooted in our inability to find a good story arc to what’s going on. I think we’re tired because we believed that vaccines were ushering in the last act where things would get back to normal. Because we’ve been formed by stories, movies, and books where that’s exactly what happens. And we’ve decided that whether it’s happening or not, we’re going to live that story.

But here is the other article I read today. It’s long and it’s kind of wordy and heady, so let me tell you what I take from it. The idea of living a story can be a Romantic one. Not a kissing story kind of romance, but one in which we seek “a life that was a novel, with a clear narrative line…not exactly tragic but indulgently melodramatic…a life with rising actions and satisfying denouements.” The writer, Tara Isabella Burton, points to a classic novel (The Brothers Karamazov) where the characters work hard to do exactly that, but says, “the moments of greatest grace in the novel are the moments when these stories collapse in on themselves, when the unexpected and the miraculous deprive us of the pleasure of narrative consummation.” Burton goes on to say that the appeal of a variety of movements — from incels to Paleo diet fans to Jordan Peterson to those seeking a return to tradition– is the alluring narrative of being the only person, or one of a few, who really get what’s going on, what she calls “a fantasy of being, in a sense, a story’s ‘main character.”

Except, Burton, says the main character in The Brothers Karamazov is not alone but has a brother who loves him very much. she says reimagining our lives less as the main character with a story arc and more as ordinary people doing life together requires the humility of laughing at ourselves, something that may not be narrative but instead poetry.

Two more pieces of the puzzle. I saw today a chart that demonstrated how we work our way through any time of transition: as we let go of the old, it is less a linear path or a story arc toward the new, and more of a ball of tangled threads. That’s how it goes. And finally, I read the obituary of a man who died at midlife, whose family wrote it felt like he had been “taken from us mid-story. ‘Why us?’ we are tempted to ask. ‘Why not us?’ he would surely have answered.”

I don’t think this means story is not instructive, is not vital, does not provide a new way of seeing the world and offer new possibilities. Stories help us escape and help us engage. But our lives are messier than that and we do well to cultivate the kind of humility that reminds us that we’re in a bigger story than we know, one in which our hope is not that we’re the main character but that the moments of grace come when the story collapses and we find ourselves loved.