“It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
Just a few words thrown into the wind to be plucked and pruned. What new meaning can be construed by a limited bunch of letters? Information in limited form can be given new beginnings, new endings, or made into something it never was. Either side can make it mean opposite things depending on agenda and experience.
A story is more than just the last line of the novel. The whole tale cannot be contained in a random passage plucked from the middle. An ominous beginning may lead to a brighter end. The story is more than one single chapter. More than one paragraph or an especially interesting quote. The story needs context, history, nuance, mystery. Don’t believe you can know the whole story by just a few words.
Lately, we are given just a few words of the story. A single picture from an extended video or a few words from a long speech or a sampling of data without regard to relation or method. New stories form from this nucleus, and may be something entirely unrelated to the original intent or its actual genesis. Too often, the story is construed into something fantastical from very limited information.
“It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” In Catcher in the Rye, what did those last words by J.D. Salinger’s convey about the whole story? Fourteen people would take those fourteen words and tell fourteen different tales. We cannot know a novel by its end, nor a whole story by just a few words, nor glean truth from snippets. The world has been rendered soundbites and memes, a whole fiction based upon just a few random bits of information.
As always, I challenge us to ask questions. Doubt before deciding. Wonder instead of settling on a set story. Don’t believe that you know the whole story by just skipping to the ending . . .
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