I’m on the lookout for a mysterious creature called a story. Supposedly, it’s complex, but simple to follow, gripping and stirring, showy, but not ostentatious. Sometimes I *think* I can sense that there’s one nearby, but I’m never quite sure of its whereabouts, or even if it still exists in the form of a fleshed-out, full-bodied story. In those instances, maybe what I’m sensing is simply the faint remnant of a story told long ago and has since faded into obscurity, and all that remain are the pieces of the bare-boned skeleton, scattered about like ancient fossils. There was once something lively and active, filled with energy and passion and spirit, but all that has since been lost to time. Utterly tragic, if so.
In its heyday, if my work is indeed correct, story would gallop boundlessly across the mouths and ears of gossiping friends at bars, prance boldly and brilliantly across theater screens, and glide gracefully and gently from a parent to a rapt child at night. It was a diverse creature indeed; there existed a distinct species for every occasion and expression of human emotion — stories based on love and sadness, stories that elicited laughter or horror, stories that found their origin in the real world or in one’s mind.
Yes — stories could be spawned entirely from one’s mind. And because of that astounding capacity, ancient peoples believed that stories were invincible, indestructible, everlasting. They assumed that story was and forever would be an innate, eternal feature of life, and perhaps even the universe.
How wrong they were.
Stories today are either gravely endangered, or — I dare not say — have already gone extinct. I certainly hope it’s not the latter, for I’m a paleontologist of story, and have longed to see a living, breathing, full-fleshed one right in front of my scarcely believing eyes. But facts are facts. All we for sure have today are accounts and narratives, the distant relatives of story. And that is no consolation to anyone, any more so than birds are recognizable from their ancestor, the mighty dinosaur.
So what happened? This is the mystery that’s consumed my life’s work for the last several decades. I’ve explored every nook and cranny, conducted countless experiments, speculated and theorized for days on end. There have been countless false starts and faulty leads. Nevertheless, I’ve managed to piece together a tentative working theory.
Just as the old adage declares that no man is an island, neither was story a creature of isolation or solitude. Instead, it existed in a mutualistic symbiotic relationship with curiosity, that creature most famously known as a predator of the cat. Curiosity would often help spawn and strengthen story, and story in turn would nurture and temporarily satisfy curiosity. It would be tempting and easy to see this as a beautiful relationship of two loving partners who gave to and took from each other in balance and harmony. So was it long believed by my fellow scholars of story.
But in fact, there existed a third prong of the relationship — knowledge. Story had a way of bringing forth and accentuating knowledge, and knowledge too had a way of bringing forth and enlivening story. Knowledge and curiosity, however, did not always share this reciprocal aspect. Much like a desert brings forth in a man a yearning for water, curiosity would spark in others a thirst for knowledge, drawing them to it. And for a while, knowledge would graciously point them towards another curiosity nearby, which would then inspire men to seek yet another knowledge, and so on and so forth. Story, meanwhile, served as their mediator, facilitating this relationship.
But there eventually came a day when this ceased. At some point, men began to see curiosity less as a beautiful and wondrous creature in its own right, and more as a mere stepping stone towards knowledge, a nuisance to be temporarily tolerated and then overcome. Instead of being filled with wonder, men at the sight of curiosity felt anxious and insecure. Subsequently, after curiosity had led men to knowledge, men stopped searching for other curiosities. They craved a shortcut to knowledge without having to first interact with anything else.
As a result, curiosity began to wither, which meant so too did story.
You see, once that point arrived at which every curiosity eventually led to knowledge but that knowledge did not lead to further curiosity, the balance of nature was irreparably disturbed. Knowledge began to overmultiply, taking up so much space that they forced curiosity out of the ecosystem. What little curiosity remained was so weak that stories could no longer be reliably spawned.
Men paid little attention to this troubling development at first. They valued knowledge above all else as their ultimate prize, and they now had it in spades. In fact, they had so much of it that they began to commodify it. They no longer bothered to seek it; instead, they could simply sit back and wait for it to drift directly to them. Knowledge was directly at their fingertips, and curiosity, they believed, was obsolete.
But therein lay their fatal mistake. For of all the gifts of story, and the fine-tuned details of its relationship between it and knowledge, the most important of them all is this: that story provides the knowledge of men with a thing called meaning — the fourth prong. Men could accumulate or hoard all the knowledge their hearts desired, but without story bestowing it with meaning, such knowledge would be utterly useless to them. They would be as a lonesome statue in a fountain, perpetually gushing with water for others from its core, but never once tasting so much of a drop of its own gift. As curiosity disappeared, so too did story, and as story disappeared, knowledge became meaningless.
Men failed to intellectually grasp this. But much as an infant that possesses no knowledge is nevertheless familiar with hunger, men felt deep in their bones that something was missing. They could not, however, decipher what it was. There was no curiosity to drive them to investigate it. And even if there had been curiosity, and they had indeed investigated it, the knowledge that it led them to would have had no meaning for them.
Soon, there arose an unnamed creature with the power of mimicry, and it camouflaged itself as knowledge. It was not true knowledge, but fake knowledge. The fraud should have quickly been spotted and vanquished — but without curiosity leading them to take a closer look, they failed to realize the deception. Hungry for something more, they neglected knowledge, lured away instead by the mimic, and subsequently, knowledge — real knowledge — began to waste away as well. Such was the tragedy that had unfolded — men had forsaken knowledge, while deluding themselves into believing that they possessed it still.
So it went. Men desired meaning while lacking the knowledge of just what it was that they desired. Once they were introduced to fake knowledge, they eagerly embraced it, but having remained stuck in the old mindset of seeing knowledge as a commodity, they treated the acquisition of fake knowledge as if it were rare game, displaying it proudly as if it were a hunting trophy. Like a misguided brotherhood, they rallied around those who possessed similar trophies while shunning those who did not. And so, in a world replete with technology meant to bridge distances and connect the population together, men drifted further and further apart from one another, retreating into their own islands of fake knowledge. Note that they *themselves* were not islands; rather, they resided on islands, and as they lost touch with their fellow man, they lost part of themselves as well. They knew not what they did not know — nor could they know, once curiosity and story and meaning were gone.
And so we are to this day. At times, a possibility occurs to me — after so much time has elapsed since the heyday of story, would the creature still be distinguishable today if it has indeed survived? Or has it, over time, evolved into something else, a form that would be unrecognizable? If I did see a story, how would I know that it is what I was seeing? And if it has indeed become so utterly unrecognizable, would it still be accurate to say that story survives?
These are troubling questions, to be sure. I hold out hope against hope that story still exists somewhere in the world, in something at least vaguely resembling its glory form. I base this hope on the other hope that what I have just conveyed is true knowledge, and where there is true knowledge, there may still exist story, and curiosity, and meaning. They may have long since become critically and irreversibly weakened; however, if I can have but one glimpse of story with my very eyes, and see for myself even the tiniest hint of its nature from olden days, that will be enough for me.
But this, I do not know.
