Who Lived When - The Monday Morning Memo

“‘Resentment is a storytelling passion,’ says the philosopher Charles Griswold in his book Forgiveness. I know well how compelling those stories are, how they grant immortality to an old injury. The teller goes in circles like a camel harnessed to a rotary water pump, diligently extracting misery, reviving feeling with each retelling. Feelings are kept alive that would fade away without narrative, or are invented by narratives that may have little to do with what once transpired and even less to do with the present moment. I learned this skill from my mother, though some of her stories were about me, and of course my perennial classics were about her. My father was destructive in a more uncomplicated way, but he is another story. Or maybe he is the misery at the root of my mother’s behavior, and he certainly made her suffer, but there were people and historical forces at the root of his, and that line of logic goes on forever.”

- Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby, p. 22

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