Are stories a way of putting order on the chaos of the world?
by Ling Ma, a lighter choice, though still set against the backdrop of a fungal plague that destroys our world. Eventually I found, Emily St John Mandel’s elegant epic of a world after a catastrophic flu pandemic. Reading, for me, has always been a form of pure entertainment, a way to escape or to educate myself. Now I was looking to books for help.
Joan Didion’s oft-quoted line says that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. I’ve always read that as: we tell ourselves stories in order to make sense of our lives. A story is a way of putting order on the chaos of the world. There is not much more chaotic than burning rainforests, melting glaciers. Right now, the world is on fire and our political systems lack the flexibility to accommodate the action we’d need to halt climate change .
What can we do about it? Day to day I feel useless in the face of climate change. I hate the feeling. I am desperate, at times, to blot it out. But what we can do is turn towards it – feel all the pain and shame and sadness. We can continue to hope that something will survive the fire. We can situate ourselves in a wider context – see ourselves as actors in the larger picture. We can feel connected to each other. This is what literature does.
Currently, I’m trying to write a novel. It has nothing to do with the end of the world. I do most of my writing at my desk, and I break at lunchtime and listen to the radio, where the world news tells me stories from Bangladesh and Brazil, cancer-causing pollution and rotting coral reefs. It is overwhelming. I close my laptop and instead look out the window at the communal gardens of my estate.
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