Diary: Life as narrative

Recently, in a review of two books on the painter Lucian Freud, the writer Julian Barnes distinguished between two types of human nature, episodic and narrative. Freud, he said, was an extreme example of the first type, a person for whom life was "one damn thing after another"; on the other end, life is a story and the events within it are part of its unfolding. 

I fall in the latter category, but "narrative" doesn't quite capture what I experience. Nor does "destiny," at least not in the sense of something that overrides everyday reality or makes more of my life than is actually warranted. It's not a sense of self-importance that I've felt since childhood, but more a sense of being among people and situations that in some cases tie together, occasionally in a very specific way. 

In his memoir, Words, Sartre talks about how, filled with the biographies of the great he read in volume in childhood, he kept looking for the turning point in his own life, the moment when his destiny would appear the way it always seemed to do in those books. I have had a few experiences that I would regard as turning points or, more accurately, as moments of recognition, but what they pointed to was in no sense set. This is why "destiny" doesn't seem right. What life hands us, in my view, are circumstances. Are they nature's dice-rolls, karma, or the outcome of some kind of interstitial conversation among the principal players? 

Moments of recognition are mostly to do with others. Many just float by us, but a handful of people appear to be there by design. Viewed in retrospect, it can look like we and they are on separate trajectories that cross, seemingly by accident, propelled by overlapping intuitions or clues. The joys and pains of the crossing are part of life, too. The Buddha counsels us otherwise, but it's hard to sidestep much of what we encounter - it seems too uncanny, when it arises, and then we plunge - the glittering sea that Horace described, with its deceptive calm and howling gale. It can also look like we've found each other again, but this too has its issues. Who is this other? We are and we aren't who we were, I would say, and considerable time goes into sorting this out, dealing with the residue we carry with us, however much we may try to shed it.

As your life unfolds, what you intuit manifests, often with "false positives" - those crossing trajectories - followed by certainty. And while you stake your life on the certainty, its main benefit is a willingness to persevere, even (or often) in the face of whatever wreckage everyday life produces. I believe this extends to the rest of the cohort - the people that matter, one's fellow actors in an unscripted narrative that each one would recount differently.