When I was too young, my mum tried to explain evolution to me.
She said: “A long time ago we used to be like monkeys, with long thick hair and claws instead of nails. We lived in the trees.”
The first problem was that when she said “we”, meaning the human race, I thought she meant “we” as in her and my dad. So I started to develop a very strange understanding of their early married life.
The second problem was that my only sustained experience of monkeys at that time had been not of the real things, but of Coco the Monkey, the mascot of Coco Pops, my favourite breakfast cereal. I came to the conclusion that my mum used to look like Coco the Monkey.
I had misunderstood the story. I realised that it was a story of origins, but instead of recognising that it was about our collective origin as a species, I’d interpreted it as a story about my parents’ origins as individuals.
I believe that at the heart of storytelling lie two questions: where do we come from, and where are we going?
These stories have been told on the individual level, as various kinds of autobiography, and they’ve also been told on the collective level, as stories about humankind as a whole. The Christian myth, Marxism, psychoanalytic theory, evolutionary theory, and lots of other stories, have all influenced the way human beings see themselves by attempting to explain where we come from and where we’re going.
Our concept of time is linear, and so are the stories we tell. Stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and I think we like to perceive our lives like that too. The middle is usually now, where we are at the moment. So the puzzle is working out how this particular story began, and guessing how it will end.
The story we tell about ourselves changes as we get older, but the anxiety does not go away – we realise that we are in the middle of something, but we want to understand the whole narrative.