I
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” This must be the most overly admired sentence by the most overly admired writer of our time. It is the renowned opening of Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album,” a canonical document of high-end alienation, and it long ago achieved fortune-cookie status. Didion was making the unsophisticated point that we abhor incoherence and so we attempt to defeat it by ordering it with interpretation. “We interpret what we see.” Yes, yes. “We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” We certainly do, though this is still a long way from an interesting view of knowledge.