问答题 Telling stories is as basic to human beings as eating. More so, in fact, for while food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living. They are what make our condition human.
This was recognized from the very beginnings of western civilization. Hesiod tells us how the founding myths were invented to explain how the world came to be and how we came to be in it. Myths were stories people told themselves in order to explain themselves to themselves and to others. But it was Aristotle who first developed this insight into a philosophical position when he argued, in his Poetics, that the art of storytelling—defined as the dramatic imitating and plotting of human action—is what gives us a shareable world.
It is, in short, only when haphazard happenings are transformed into story, and thus made memorable over time, that we become full agents of our history.