The Value of A Good Story
My Dear
People,
Some time ago, a
friend lent me a bag of books. Among that bag of books, there was a collection
of essays, published in 1916, by one Elbert Hubbard (not to be confused
with L. Ron Hubbard of Scientology fame). I came to learn that Elbert Hubbard,
whom I had never heard of, was a fascinating character, a man of tremendous
energy and initiative: an entrepreneur, a magazine editor, and a motivational
speaker, among other things. Becoming more and more interested, I did a little
Internet surfing (Wikipedia, Google, etc.) on him. I was glad I did. A man who
always had an ear out for a good story had quite a story himself. And one pair
of his stories in particular got my attention.
In the aftermath of
the sinking of the Titanic, Hubbard,
along with the rest of the country and much of the world, learned the stories of
many of the passengers of that now famous ship. One story in particular caught
Hubbard's notice, that of Isidor & Ida Straus. (Isidor, along with his
brother Nathan, co-owned Macy's Department Store.) When it became clear that
the ship would sink, and passengers began boarding lifeboats, Ida Straus was
offered a place in one of the lifeboats, while her husband was not. There was a
choice to be made. "Not I--I will not leave my husband. All these years we've
traveled together, and shall we part now? No, our fate is one." For Ida Straus
the choice was clear.
On learning of the
Strauses' story Elbert Hubbard wrote,
The Strauses' story is
striking in its own right, and Hubbard's commentary on their story is, as well.
The story and the commentary become all the more remarkable when juxtaposed with
events that followed just over three years later: On May 1, 1915, Elbert Hubbard
and his wife Alice boarded another ocean liner, the Lusitania. You may know the story. Six days
later, on May 7, off the coast of Ireland, a German u-boat torpedoed the ocean
liner.
A fellow passenger
later wrote Elbert Hubbard, Jr.,
One wonders whether,
during those moments, Elbert Hubbard's own words passed through his mind, from
when he had written of the Strauses just three years earlier, "They knew how to
live, how to love and how to die."
We love a good story,
don't we? In stories we look for ourselves. In stories we look for meaning.
Stories of all kinds, that book of stories called "the Bible," for example. And
the best stories are the ones that defy easy reduction to a "lesson" or
"moral." It is the spirit of what we call "fundamentalism" that urges us to
reduce the richness of story to some more manageable lesson at the expense of a
deeper truth. The best stories demand, on the other hand, that we accept a
fuller truth than we have yet known, or, perhaps, that we accept once again a truth that we needed to hear
anew, or more deeply. The best stories also
always leave room for the unknown, the yet-to-be-known, the mystery: the
mystery of our lives; which is the mystery of the cosmos; which is, after all,
the mystery of God.
Indeed, you might say
that, at its heart, every good story is a Mystery.
