To read or to write stories is to have hope

Somewhere in a book, the sky is blue and there is birdsong rustling through the treetops. People hold hands, or hug, or kiss without fear. Friends walk side by side, arm in arm or arm over shoulder.

No matter how dark the premise is in a story, there is always some kind of redemption. The worst case scenarios—the death of a loved one as in Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” or losing memory as in Yōko Ogawa’s “Memory Police” or an all-consuming love that is unrequited as in Orhan Pamuk’s “The Museum of Innocence” or the end of the world as in Max Brooks’ “World War Z”—also bring out the best of something else, such as, from the books I have just mentioned, the poetry of grief, the pricelessness of remembering, the purity of love that doesn’t expect anything in return, or how precious survival is.

Everything is beautiful in a story, even pain or sorrow or loss or ugliness. Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s “Beauty and the Beast,” right? Or Victor Hugo’s “Notre-Dame de Paris,” better known as “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Anything you put into words, or express as some form of art, like a photograph or a painting or sculpture or song, achieves a heightened level of meaning, which makes it beautiful.

That’s why this week, in observance of National Literature Month, we are dedicating Panorama to stories drawn by some of our readers either from experience or from their imagination or both. Check out any of these stories: “A Changed Man” by D. Posadas, “Scratches” and “The Clouds of Kiltepan” by Fae Marie Esperas, and “Sentenced to Life” by this writer.

There is a story in everything, which is to say that everything is a story, but it’s no story unless someone else, even the author himself or herself, wants to read it or hear it or follow it to its happy or sorrowful or hanging end.

So first it must be written. The job of the writer is to connect the dots, to find a meaningful thread among the odds and ends of day to day, to imagine the big picture which the seemingly disparate pieces must come together to form. It is in these connections, in the interpretation of random events as part and parcel of a grand design, in the elevation of mundane, everyday goings-on to the level of legends and myths that we find hope, which essentially underlines every story for without hope why do we even bother to follow a story to the very end?

Listen to the mustn’ts, child. Listen to the don’ts. Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me… Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.

―Shel Silverstein

Stories are what makes us human, whether they are personal or out of this world, whether they are set in the present, unfold in the past, or unravel in some distant future.

Stories exist because it is as essential to us to know that there are more to us than our 24-hour-a-day existence, that there are forces in the universe that are bigger than us, that we are here for a higher purpose, not simply being born and dying every day until we are buried in the ground or turn back to ashes.

We read stories because we hope against hope that our life on earth has meaning. We read stories to nurture this hope, to live in this hope, and to see ourselves as part of this hope.

Or, as I used to tell my students of writing, to whom the best lesson I could ever give is to read, read, read, we read because when facts are dreary or ghastly or hopeless, we can always turn to fiction or non-fiction that tells the story like it were fiction.