Quotation

(Part 2) But there’s another way. There are stories. Maybe stories don’t just make us matter to each other – maybe they’re also the only way to the infinite mattering he’d been after for so long. Say I tell someone about my feral hog hunt. Even if it’s a dumb story, telling it changes other people just the slightest little bit, just as living the story changes me. And that infinitesimal change ripples outward – every smaller but everlasting. I will get forgotten, but the stories will last, and so we all matter – maybe less than a lot, but always more than none. And it wasn’t only the remembered stories that mattered. There’s a place in the brain for knowing what cannot be remembered. That brief walk – from the screened-in porch outside to the Hearse – was one of those moments he knew he’d remember and look back on, one of those moments that he’d try to capture in the stories he told. Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering.