What is it like to be the old man silenced by a stroke, the young man facing the executioner, the woman walking across the border, the child on the roller coaster, the person you've only read about, or the one next to you in bed? Which means that a place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller's art, and then a way of traveling from here to there. To love someone is to put yourself in their place, we say, which is to put yourself in their story, or figure out how to tell yourself their story. Stories are compasses and architecture we navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and our prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of a world that spreads in all directions like arctic tundra or sea ice. ![]() What's your story? It's all in the telling. ![]() Excerpt from THE FARAWAY NEARBY By Rebecca Solnit 1. The author of "A Field Guide to Getting Lost" and "Wanderlust" reflects on her mother's Alzheimer's, the power of storytelling, and how our stories shape us. In her new book, "The Faraway Nearby," San Francisco author Rebecca Solnit contemplates the nature of storytelling and empathy.
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