transmission

In my Murakami class, we've just finished Sputnik Sweetheart and in it there's a passage where Sumire (one of the three main characters) talks about the power of narrative as a kind of "transmission." That is, like a car's transmission. I know this seems weird, but her point (it actually comes from the narrator of the story who thinks it up) is that the world around us is full of hostile and chaotic forces, and the stories we tell about the world moderate those forces in the same way that a car's transmission directs the engine's raw power into something that can turn a drive train and move the wheels. Get it? I think it's a pretty interesting idea. It certainly relates to a lot of experiences that seem to make sense only in retrospect: when they're occurring, they're often painful because they seem random and meaningless.

This reminds me too of something Hannah Arendt said: narrative makes life endurable. The problem? People seem to be losing the ability to tell interesting stories.