Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe

This was called the ‘steady state’ theory. But it did not answer my naive question either: supposing it had always been here, how did it happen always to have been here?

Apart from the mistake of believing that the Old Testament was a coded message intended to be understood exclusively by them, the other big mistake the early Christians made was in reading its stories literally rather than symbolically, as news reporting rather than as an artistic creation.

thinking is a creative act that conjures different meanings from the reality it encounters.

One of the most poignant aspects of our industrialised food industry is the occasional glimpse the television camera affords us of what goes on behind the scenes, like the mournful gaze of that beast in the cattle truck I saw a few days ago.

Musicians ‘hear’ a tune in their heads and rush to get it down before it fades away. Some writers are invaded by a phrase and follow it like a trail of breadcrumbs to wherever it takes them. I have spoken to distinguished painters who told me that some of their work just poured out of them onto the canvas in a manic rush they found it hard to keep

Jazz happens when musicians respond to each other and make unscripted music never heard before. Mabey had heard birds doing that. They weren’t just feathered robots programmed to pour out their songs. They were capable of making new music in response to other birds. They did jazz. They had agency.

they too easily switch from expressions of belief to defiant statements of fact. That’s where their danger lies.

we are told that Job is undoubtedly righteous, so his prosperity could be said to lend support to the traditional view; but we also know that, for no reason other than his own whimsical interest in the test, God is about to deprive Job of the official rewards of genuine virtue.

they are both obsessed with questions of meaning. Sometimes I think this is just a way of winding up those atheists who betray a religious or evangelical intensity in promoting their atheism.

The prevailing sense that something is ending and something worse is dawning spawns all sorts of reactions, from world-denying asceticism to fevered excess. In religious communities these ages of anxiety usually prompt an in-turning against the world as the deformed creation of a fallen spirit. However we account for it, it was through this dark le