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It was dark. I was driving. I listened to an NPR interview with a popular American novelist.

He was asked to offer various self-congratulatory claims on his understanding of humanity--goodness, fraternity, faith in a shared morality, etcetera. His positions on these things were unremarkably uniform, unparsed, and vaguely similar to the suburban highway I was driving down, although they lacked the road's punctuated luminescence.

Writing like this guy's, and moreover the quality of being a writer, conveys itself atop the offer of narrative truth. It says "these words that are on the page offer a story. From a story we can learn."

Every story has a beginning and ending, and the adherence to these generic requirements carries the story's truth. Stories that don't have this endingness are just chronicles of events.

Narrativity is central to our ability to make sense of the world. We discern shared truth through stories. But narrativity is a myth. These truths--goodness, fraternity, whatever--just rest on other stories that we consider believable and sensible for the time being. There is no concrete truth about goodness; there are only certain stories that seem to make more sense than others.

The interviewer ended with a question: "Would you read to us from your latest book so that we can hear an upbeat story about a father and his son? With all the bad events in the recent news, I think our readers would like to hear something upbeat."

Father and son stories are some of the oldest and most popular of all times. But behind the fallings-out and redemptions of the family, they are also some of the most violent and isolating. But the moral of this story, and of most of the others, was that caring for another person makes for an understanding of what it means to be human.

We make fictions of truth to hide the unlimited beginnings and endings that a story could have. This is how we stay upbeat. Not because the world is violent, but because the world just is. And that is inconsolable. And that won't get a story published.

I turned the radio off. Cars would pass now and later.