This again is from Bruce Jackson’s wonderful The Story is True: The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories, and speaks to our human urge to reframe our experiences into coherent narratives so that we can understand what happens to us and around us:
“When we can’t figure out the plot in real life, people say, ‘It’s senseless, just senseless.’ And that may be true; it may be senseless. Sense is a product of our intelligence, not a condition of the world. But few of us are satisfied with ‘it’s senseless’ as an explanation. We want bottom lines. We want villains and conspiracies and plots like those in movies and novels; we want to live in a causal universe, a universe in which things make sense.”
