Heroes Not Zombies

“I think what I’m trying to say is that every human being could be said to be as much an accumulation of stories as of molecules. I am, in part, all the things I have read over the years. They don’t leave me. They settle inside me like – how can I put it? – like sediment.….we ought to be mapping out … the sequence of the stories that go to make up a life.” – from The Seducer, Jan Kjaerstad.

I’m re-reading Jan Kjaerstad’s remarkable Norwegian trilogy, The Seducer, The Conqueror and The Discoverer. I read them the years they were published in English, which was 2003 for the first volume. Do you find, if you return to a book after an interval of several years, that there’s a real mix of the comfortably familiar and the surprisingly new? I read some passages and remember them as if I read them yesterday, and yet others I feel I’m reading for the first time.

That passage I’ve quoted above is about how stories create who we are, perhaps more than our genes do. I’ve long been fascinated by our stories and felt so privileged to hear patients’ stories every day. In fact, I thought that was at the core of my work as a doctor – to enable people to tell their unique stories, to help them understand what those stories mean, and to co-create new stories with them, stories which would heal.

But this passage from the novel suddenly made me think of other stories. Not the ones we tell ourselves and others, but the ones we read.

I don’t know why I haven’t given much thought to that before, but, surely, the stories we have read, not only stay with us, but fashion the lenses through which we perceive the world, turn our attention in certain directions and away from others, lay the foundations for our habits…..our habits of thinking, feeling and acting.

I don’t think it’s just the fiction stories which have that power. It’s the non-fiction ones too, the histories, sciences, biographies, and so on.

How important is it to me that my grandpa read me all of Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather? How important is it that I looked forward every week to the part work magazines of “Look and Learn” and “Knowledge”? How important is it to me that I read the myths and folklore of different countries?

As I start to think about this, a whole collection of different books come to my mind, and I’m starting to wonder about the ones which settled, like sediment, inside me, and to begin to map out the stories “that go to make up a life”.

Does that inspire you to do the same?