Other people’s stories …?: Why do you want them?

You (i am speaking now to “you,” who have just told me one, rather than the you who is “me,” the I, whom I addressed in the treacherous second person of the second sentence above that allowed me to shift out of my own skin and assume yours, as if it was “you” who were asking me why I wanted your story). You guess, correctly, that in asking you to tell me your story, I am stepping into the privacy of your life to make it mine. I intend to be in your story by listening to it. Say you tell me a story about someone I think I know, “you” — my interest indicates that I have a share in “you.”

What happens in the story is interesting because it might have happened to “you” but it gains interest for me because it recalls one of my own.

A young man (it’s always a young man it seems—the literature of old men in love with young women is withering away), a talented young man, is pursuing you. In your stories there is always “another” young man who at the moment you are in love with, but who is away in Romania, Czechoslovakia, the bush in Uganda. No trick it seems in the narratives you unfold is too underhanded by the “present” boyfriend in pursuit of your supple body, a gymnast’s and your acrobatic affections, to win your consent to stepping out of your clothes, letting him work his will. He pretends to know you better than you know yourself. You are angry, but almost tempted to believe him. For not knowing who you are, you are prone to believe whatever story someone you are attracted to tells you.

What happens in the story I was told is your business but of course it is a story and what might have happened is as important, possibly even more than what does. What does not happen in a story allows a reader to step into it and imagine himself, herself, in the role of one of the characters, yours, the young intruder’s or even the absent one’s. Having watched the dance in which you disrobe, once, your stories of taking your clothes off with another are all too vivid.

Why tell such stories unless you want others to find themselves in your place?

Who is most prone to listen to the story of an old lamp burnished by a rag that rubbed, rubbed hard will let loose, in the shape of a cloud, a giant Djinn or Genie who can bend to your wish?

Children and old men who wish to travel forward and back on the flying carpet of the story!

“Do you always demand secrets?” the nubile creature on the other side of the table asked me. She is not the “you” I was just speaking to. This other young woman comes from a world of veiled possibilities. She is unwilling, however, to do more than hint at them.

“Is a story,” I am tempted to reply, “worth telling if it does not have a secret?” Without magic islands would anyone have repeated the stories of a Greek sailor returning after a long, bloody campaign, without a single one of the local men he set out to war, alongside? I imagine the city or town would simply have stoned their defeated chieftain, then forgotten him and his miserable tally of loss under a pile of rocks. For good measure, the captain added a side trip to see a dead mother in the world beyond life. You don’t have to believe in secrets to want to hear them. Take another example, closer in time, and geography.

Would copyists have preserved the poem of a Florentine exile, if it had only ranted on about the injustice of his banishment, and whining along the way consigned his enemies to the flames of a general Hell? The poet had to suggest that finding the entrance to the tortures of this place, he descended terrace to terrace, revealing nastiness but promising that...