I appreciate the sense of selection implicit in the solution you propose, taking hold of facts, shaking them loose, detaching them from the bigger stories into which they have settled and viewing them in the context of the other facts that have intrigued us, arranging them all into a new story, a story of our own. Among other things, it reminds me of the line from Emerson's Spiritual Laws, "A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him, wherever he goes." Excited to see how you think of the product of that activity, the essay, which must be a kind of alternative to or replacement of religion.
A question I had: you say all Big Stories draw a firm line between sanity and madness, or what we can simply call the "in" and the "out." Is that true? Are there are any Big Stories or big story traditions in which it is a central and enduring impulse to blur that line, to erase the (traditionally built-up) distinction? For example, the early Christian church seems to have been animated by a desire to erase distinctions like one between the "righteous" and the "villainous" or "rejected," or generally between the "in" and the "out." In fact, this remains a strand of Christianity to the present day. If so, are they a counterexample to your conception of big stories or were and are they not adherents of what you would call a Big Story? Why not? This leads me to wonder if your problem is not with big stories as such but a rigid interpretation, enforcement and weaponization of them.
I appreciate the sense of selection implicit in the solution you propose, taking hold of facts, shaking them loose, detaching them from the bigger stories into which they have settled and viewing them in the context of the other facts that have intrigued us, arranging them all into a new story, a story of our own. Among other things, it reminds me of the line from Emerson's Spiritual Laws, "A man is a method, a progressive arrangement; a selecting principle, gathering his like to him, wherever he goes." Excited to see how you think of the product of that activity, the essay, which must be a kind of alternative to or replacement of religion.
A question I had: you say all Big Stories draw a firm line between sanity and madness, or what we can simply call the "in" and the "out." Is that true? Are there are any Big Stories or big story traditions in which it is a central and enduring impulse to blur that line, to erase the (traditionally built-up) distinction? For example, the early Christian church seems to have been animated by a desire to erase distinctions like one between the "righteous" and the "villainous" or "rejected," or generally between the "in" and the "out." In fact, this remains a strand of Christianity to the present day. If so, are they a counterexample to your conception of big stories or were and are they not adherents of what you would call a Big Story? Why not? This leads me to wonder if your problem is not with big stories as such but a rigid interpretation, enforcement and weaponization of them.