My life as a Curious Autodidact

Stories, stories everywhere. From cradle to grave we tell stories with hardly a pause from work, play, and sleep. We read bedtime stories to children, concoct stories about our fishing exploits, and confide “you’ll never believe this” stories to friends, and hairdressers. We shed tears over Love Story, titillate with the Story of O., devour inside stories, and flock to see the sequels to The Neverending Story. We rehash triumphs at work as quest sagas, failures in romance as Aeschylean tragedies, and holiday hunts for that no-frills Athens hotel near Omonia Square as mini-odysseys. Late for work, we feed stories to the boss from the hallowed repertoire of traffic snarls, ailing relatives, and automobile malfunctions. Late at night we even dream stories, sometimes in beta-wave equivalent of Panasonic and Technicolor.

Beside ubiquity, our propensity for storytelling has other characteristics. First of all, it is universal. Every culture we know has developed its preferred range and type of stories. Matter of fact, oftentimes we learn much of these chronologically or geographically distant societies through the stories they preserved in their versions of Thousand and One Nights or the Eddas. Second, the impulse to tell, invent, make up, construct, create, write, recite – in short, narrate – stories is inseparable from being Homo sapiens. We string words into sentences, sentences into plots, and from then we’re off on life’s journey to add our own stories to the stock of those that came before.

—Of Literature and Knowledge, Peter Swirski (pg. 1)