Avoiding Narrative
“What Old Age Is Really Like” by Ceridwen Dovey in The New Yorker:
As Helen Small writes in ”The Long Life,” her study of the literature and philosophy of old age, “declining to describe our lives as unified stories … is the only way we can hope to live out our time other than as tragedy.” Lively describes the frustrations of autobiographical memory in old age. “The novelist in me—the reader, too—wants shape and structure, development, a theme, insights,” she writes. “Instead of which, there is this assortment of slides, some of them welcome, others not at all, defying chronology, refusing structure.”
My habit when writing here is both a narrative of self-improvement and inexorably toward “profound” conclusions. There are countless posts where I imply that I’ve finally “figured out” why I can’t relax or why I have not been enjoying myself or how I need to just stop and smell the roses. Such neat writing is in error. It would be better to vividly illustrate my failings and vividly illustrate my experiences, leaving aside conclusions, unifying themes, profound insights. After all, narrative arc is difficult enough, much less drawing one without the benefit of time having passed. It would be like writing the story of your sailing based on the turn you took out of port.