The Mirror of Medusa

Resumo

We are a narrative species. We try to piece together our fragmented experience of the world through stories that attempt to lend coherence to the scattered pages that the world throws in our path. Dante speaks of an unbound book dispersed throughout the universe. We try to piece that book together by lending it a beginning, a middle and an end. Our stories largely concern our pilgrimage through life. Raymond Queneau noted that every story is either the Odyssey or the Iliad because every life is both a battle and a voyage. To make sense of every event, to accept and explain the uncertain nature of our every experience, and the fear that this uncertainty provokes, we conjure up characters and plots, weave arguments and dream up nightmares, dreading the arrival at the last page. Every one of our stories is also the story of the Apocalypse. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – Conquest, War, Famine and Death – have been with us since the beginning of human memory.