Gramsci's "First Notebook", 8 February 1929. Photo from International Gramsci Society
As Socrates puts it:
The unexamined life is not worth living.
One of the philosophers that i admire is Ricoeur (Giddens also has a special place in my brain). Ricoeur believes that life has a passion in search of a narrative (read his work, "life in quest of a narrative").
Life as he sees it, is an odd mixture of action (bring about change) and pathos (passion or suffering). This means that life has aspects that are either in our control or outside our control. This gives life its disconcordant element.
However, even when life is disconcordant, it is the concordance that we seek. But concordance is never found without disconcordance. And that makes life interesting in its own.
Life tells about the self, the subject. It is not just a flow of experiences. The flow of life has a logic, a narrative (other term for stories). Life, through and through, and intrinsically is already interpreted. Narrative is one form of interpretation.
It is through the narrative that life finds its meaning. An examined life is a recounted life. We find the value of life when we emplot and synthesize it into a narrative.
But the meaning of life is not completed just with the narrative. Ricoeur believes that the reader plays an integral role in its significance. The act of reading becomes the critical moment of the analysis. On it rests the narrative's capacity to transfigure the experience of the reader.
This is the reason why our everyday life includes narrating our lives and recounting other people's narratives. From that news you read in the morning, your complains regarding your boss, to that movie you watched in the evening. That's why blogs, medium, steemit, and other story platforms exist. The ones who lived the life narrates them, hoping to find its meaning. And as the ones who consumes, reads, and recounts this narratives, we often find and ascribe significance to it.
Yes words do matter. But narratives are even more important. Narratives connects people across societies and across generations. Although the one who lived the life might have lived through its finitude, his narratives could still transcend time.
