The old idea from Iris Murdoch endures: the most important revelation that stories offer is that other people exist. Stories in fiction and stories unfolding right before our eyes. Other people exist! A miraculous banality, half comedy and half tragedy, and a truth that takes rituals and habits to take seriously. We calibrate our inflated sense of self by learning from others’ gifts and from their suffering, and perhaps we learn the most when those two are almost irreducibly mixed.
