Pattern, Perspective, and Trust: Barry Lopez on Storytelling

“It is through story… that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.”

We are self-contradictory creatures moving through a discontinuous world, glimpsing only fragments of reality. The hallmark of our species, the cost of living inside a consciousness so elaborate yet so self-limited, is that we know all this and yet we hunger for cohesion, for continuity, for pattern.

We ca...