The New Story of Your Life
Say you finally invented a new story of your life. It is not the story of your defeat or of your impotence and powerlessness before the large forces of wind and accident. It is not the sad story of your mother's death or of your abandoned childhood. It is not, even, a story that will win you the deep initial sympathies of the benevolent gods or the care of the generous, but it is a story that requires of you a large thrust into the difficult life, a sense of plenitude entirely your own. Whatever the story is, it goes as it goes, and there are variations in it, gardens that need to be planted, skills sown, the long hard labors of prose and enduring love. Deep down in some long-encumbered self, it is the story you have been writing all of your life, where no Calypso holds you against your own willfulness, where you can rise from the bleak island of your old story and tread your way home.
- Michael Blumenthal
Say you finally invented a new story of your life. It is not the story of your defeat or of your impotence and powerlessness before the large forces of wind and accident. It is not the sad story of your mother's death or of your abandoned childhood. It is not, even, a story that will win you the deep initial sympathies of the benevolent gods or the care of the generous, but it is a story that requires of you a large thrust into the difficult life, a sense of plenitude entirely your own. Whatever the story is, it goes as it goes, and there are variations in it, gardens that need to be planted, skills sown, the long hard labors of prose and enduring love. Deep down in some long-encumbered self, it is the story you have been writing all of your life, where no Calypso holds you against your own willfulness, where you can rise from the bleak island of your old story and tread your way home.
- Michael Blumenthal
