Just in the last few days, I started seeing a rash of articles and Substack posts with very similar titles: “Kamala Harris Will Win on Tuesday, and It Won’t Be Close” or “Donald Trump WILL Be Defeated on Election Day.” Of course, polling at the time was a nearly perfect illustration of a toss-up: In the states that would decide the election, some had Harris slightly ahead, some had Trump slightly ahead, and all of the differences were well within the margin of error. Did the people who wrote these articles have some unique information about how the election would turn out?
Of course not. They were simply practicing the Coué Method: striving to speak a desirable outcome into being. Then, if your word becomes truth, you can claim a share of the credit; and if your word does not become truth, you can blame all those who voted as you did but did not add to their vote the event-compelling Voice. But in the latter case the comfort will be cold and the desolation great.
All this made me think of Joan Didion’s most famous sentence: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” It’s a sentence that has found its way onto Pinterest boards, T-shirts, and coffee mugs, as though it were a consoling affirmation of The Power of Storytelling. It is not.
The sentence is the first one of Didion’s essay “The White Album,” which she used also as the title of a collection of essays that she published in 1979. Here’s the opening paragraph of the essay and the book:
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
That is, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live” because there is no story outside of our minds: “We live entirely…by the imposition of a narrative line on disparate images” (emphasis mine). Our endless telling of stories is, then, the product not of delight but of despair: of our inability to face the chaos of what is.
If people knew the context of the sentence, they wouldn’t be putting it on T-shirts. Instead, they’d be driven to therapy, to alcohol, or to church.
The last essay in The White Album is called “On the Morning After the Sixties,” but it begins not with anything that happened in the Sixties but with one Saturday in 1953, when Didion was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. A date had taken her to a pre-football-game lunch at a fraternity house, but afterwards, when almost everyone else left for the game, Didion had stayed behind to lie on a sofa and read a book about Lionel Trilling. Her only company was a middle-aged man who spent the afternoon trying to play “Blue Room” on a piano.
All that afternoon he sat at the piano and all that afternoon he played “Blue Room” and he never got it right. I can hear and see it still, the wrong note in “We will thrive on / Keep alive on,” the sunlight falling through the big windows, the man picking up his drink and beginning again and telling me, without ever saying a word, something I had not known before about bad marriages and wasted time and looking backward. That such an afternoon would now seem implausible in every detail—the idea of having had a “date” for a football lunch now seems to me so exotic as to be almost czarist—suggests the extent to which the narrative on which many of us grew up no longer applies.
She wrote these words in 1970, as young people were gradually or suddenly coming to realize that the narrative on which they had grown up, the narrative of the Sixties, no longer applied. They would have to find a new one. Until then, the world is a “white album”—a neatly bound volume in which all the pictures are blank.
On Wednesday, November 6, 2024, millions of people whose political affiliation is their religion will also be in great need of a new story: maybe those who are at this moment writing that Kamala Harris will win and they know it; or maybe those who have assured me that Donald Trump’s survival of his assassination attempts proves that he is the Lord’s Anointed. But many Americans will soon find themselves feeling the need to impose a narrative on the blankly disparate images that march down the screens of their phones. If politics is your life, then you must tell yourself a political story in order to live.