That’s how we thought once, those of us who had been born in the twentieth century. We looked to stories and parables, to plays, films, and poems as a mirror-universe in which we might better see ourselves. Literature, in all its expanding forms, was the very heart of our culture, where we might share disappointments and sorrows, judge and reverse all wrongs, celebrate joys, even take revenge, and express hopes for the future. And this too, remember, is a story I’m trying to put before you, a self-justification that will help me escape the torment of what was once called “narrative dysfunction,” the inability to piece together a story about one’s life, as if connectedness was some kind of salvation.
–George Zebrowski, 1995