What is a story before it becomes words? Bare experience, a Buddhist monk might answer. Pure presence. The sensation, fleeting and ungraspable, of being a boy, of losing a father. Being a book, we wouldn’t know. All we know are the thoughts that arise in the wake of bare experience, like shadows, or echoes, giving voice to what no longer is. And after these thoughts become words, and words become stories, what is left of bare experience, itself? Nothing, the monk might say. All that remains is story, like a molted exoskeleton or an emptied shell.
