Alan Jacobs on ‘“Joan Didion’s most famous sentence: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”’

“That is, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” because there is no story outside of our minds: “We live entirely…by the imposition of a narrative line on disparate images” (emphasis mine). Our endless telling of stories is, then, the product not of delight but of despair: of our inability to face the chaos of what is. If people knew the context of the sentence, they wouldn’t be putting it on T-shirts. Instead, they’d be driven to therapy, to alcohol, or to church…

On Wednesday, November 6, 2024, millions of people whose political affiliation is their religion will also be in great need of a new story: maybe those who are at this moment writing that Kamala Harris will win and they know it; or maybe those who have assured me that Donald Trump’s survival of his assassination attempts proves that he is the Lord’s Anointed. But many Americans will soon find themselves feeling the need to impose a narrative on the blankly disparate images that march down the screens of their phones. If politics is your life, then you must tell yourself a political story in order to live.”

Read the whole post here.