‘Life Keeps Changing’: Why Stories, Not Science, Explain the World<\/a> by Joe Fassler in The Atlantic.<\/p>\nThe Text:<\/strong> The natural world is a source of wonder and even horror for Jennifer Percy, author of Demon Camp, but science can only explain so much. After Percy read Lawrence Sargent Hall\u2019s \u201cThe Ledge\u201d for the first time in college, she dropped her physics major\u2014and started asking questions about story, memory, and narrative. Stories, she now says\u2014invented, reported\u2014better capture the full, complex reality of human beings and our surrounding universe.<\/p>\nIn Demon Camp, a work of immersion journalism, Percy tells the story of a rural faith community where people \u201creceive deliverance\u201d through Christian exorcisms. The Covenant Bible Institute is funded, in part, by the efforts of Army Sgt. Caleb Daniels, who came home from Afghanistan suffering from suicidal ideation and frightening hallucinations Percy grounds the story\u2014in which she plays a central role\u2014in the history and science of trauma-induced hysteria. But scholarship is never used to dispute or dispel the visceral \u201crealness\u201d of the demons her haunted subjects live with. Percy\u2019s willingness to entertain her characters\u2019 logic reaches its height in the book\u2019s climax\u2014when she agrees to undergo an exorcism herself. Last week, the New York Times Book Review compared Demon Camp to James Agee\u2019s classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Jennifer Percy\u2019s writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Oxford American. Her brother, who she mentioned in our conversation, is the writer Benjamin Percy\u2014author of 2013\u2019s werewolf epic, Red Moon and a past contributor to \u201cBy Heart.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jennifer Percy spoke to me by phone from her home in Brooklyn, where she teaches writing at New York University.<\/p>\n
Jennifer Percy: The lessons my father taught me as a child all revolved around science. He was an amateur physicist and saw the world through only that lens. I remember him saying that we are all formed of stardust, that the atoms in our bodies began in stars millions of years ago. Or how, if we stepped into a black hole, we\u2019d be turned into a stream of subatomic particles. I remember him telling me about matter depressurizing in space, how our eyeballs would come out of their sockets.<\/p>\n
The natural world was a huge part of my childhood. We lived in rural Oregon, between the mountains and the desert, with not a lot of people around. We spent our weekends in the wilderness. Night was very dark, and every night we\u2019d go out and look through a telescope at stars. But they wouldn\u2019t be stars to my father. He\u2019d call them \u201cdying suns.\u201d<\/p>\n
If I burnt a gingerbread man in the oven, and cried to him about it, he\u2019d say, \u201cWell, one day the sun\u2019s going to destroy the earth. Then we\u2019ll all be like the gingerbread man.\u201d<\/p>\n
This brand of science terrified me\u2014but my dad found comfort in going to the stars. He flees from what messy realm of human existence, what he calls \u201cdysfunctional reality\u201d or \u201cpeople problems.\u201d When you imagine that we\u2019re just bodies on a rock, small concerns become insignificant. He keeps an image above his desk, taken by the Hubble space telescope, that from a distance looks like an image of stars\u2014but if you look more closely, they are not stars, they are whole galaxies. My dad sees that, imagining the tiny earth inside one of these galaxies\u2014and suddenly, the rough day, the troubles at work, they disappear.<\/p>\n
Still, I found the brutal immensity of the universe frightening. My brother and I, like many kids, were shaped by poking through the books we had at home, and we had just two kinds: physics books and Stephen King books. Both were terrifying. So we had to choose what kind of fear we liked best\u2014the terror of the universe or the terror of the clown that lives in the sewer and is going to kill you. I think my brother chose Stephen King and I chose Stephen Hawking.<\/p>\n
I pursued a career in science, and in college, I studied physics. I worked with those guys that make Mars Rovers and understand the properties of crystals and who ride in the Vomit Comet over the Gulf of Mexico, imagining themselves space-bound. But I was unhappy.<\/p>\n
The language of science was unsatisfying to me. \u201cThe most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it\u2019s comprehensible,\u201d Einstein said. But I don\u2019t think human relationships are ever fully comprehensible. They can clarify for small, beautiful moments, but then they change. Unlike a scientific experiment with rigorous, controlled parameters, our lives are boundless and shifting. And there\u2019s never an end to the story. We need more than science\u2014we need storytelling to capture that kind of complexity, that kind of incomprehensibility.<\/p>\n
And this is a fundamental problem with writing nonfiction. People say, \u201cHow do you write a profile of someone? How do you capture them fully?\u201d Well, you don\u2019t. It\u2019s artifice. There are small moments, little parts, that crystallize\u2014but they are part of something larger that\u2019s always changing and evolving. Even if you\u2019re writing autobiography, you only capture a specimen of a larger self. You\u2019re not ever going to comprehend a life fully on the page, because life keeps changing.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I started writing instead of going to my regular classes. I was writing about Russia, because I\u2019d spent that summer above the Arctic Circle studying trees and fish and pinecones and how the Russian weren\u2019t doing a good job keeping things alive up there. It was surreal. Never dark. Lots of vodka. I fell in love with this American and we dated\u2014whatever dating looks like up there\u2014but I could never let him know how much I loved him. I was just dying inside. So I had to write about him to make him, maybe to make him less powerful but also to understand this madness I felt. And so I did. It was really love that made me write. I started reading Joyce and Woolf and Forester, and I felt like a perfectly normal human being when I was inside those books. There was this one professor, David Price, and he talked about literature beautifully. The characters were so real it was almost as if they were hanging out in the room with us. He gave us this short story called \u201cThe Ledge,\u201d by Lawrence Sargent Hall. It\u2019s not a very well-known piece, though it does appear in some anthologies, as well as The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. It\u2019s about an old fisherman who leaves the warmth of his wife\u2019s bed on Christmas Day to shoot sea ducks with his son. He promised his son they\u2019d go hunting. In the end, when out collecting the dead ducks on the sand. The skiff drifts off to sea and they are trapped together, the water rising, and they are waiting for their death.<\/p>\n
Again, I grew up in a place where nature was always encroaching on my life, was always infiltrating my feelings\u2014either literally through the wilderness or intellectually through my father\u2019s science lessons. And \u201cThe Ledge,\u201d with its deadly, encroaching high tide, spoke to me profoundly. It helped me formulate questions about how the immensity and cruelty of the universe coexists with ordinary love, the everyday circumstances of human beings. The story leaves us with an image of this fisherman caught man pitilessly between these two worlds. It posed a question that became an obsession, and that followed me into my writing: what happens to your character when nature and humanity brutally encounter one another?<\/p>\n
In the passage I chose, the father has already hoisted his son up onto his shoulders. The sea is rising. The dog is already dead. The skiff is gone. As the water\u2019s rises over his boots, everything sort of bottoms out, and the landscape that he had perceived and believed to know and control, deteriorates. The image is baptismal, but it\u2019s a baptism of death. Here\u2019s what happens next:<\/p>\n
The boy did for the fisherman the greatest thing that can be done. He may have been too young for perfect terror, but he was old enough to know there were things beyond the power of any man. All he could do he did, by trusting his father to do all he could, and asking nothing more.<\/p>\n
The fisherman, rocked to his soul by a sea, held his eyes shut upon the interminable night.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs it time now?\u201d The boy said<\/p>\n
The fisherman could hardly speak. \u201cNot yet,\u201d he said. \u201cNot just yet.\u201d<\/p>\n
The fisherman has made the gravest mistake, the son maintains faith in his father. The choice to maintain this illusion of hope, which neither one really believes in\u2014they both know they won\u2019t be saved, is beautiful. We have to keep that love for other human beings alive at all times, even when the water is rising over our mouths and into our lungs and carrying us towards death.<\/p>\n
We never know how we\u2019re going to respond to extraordinary circumstances. We can go into the world, performing whatever role we choose to inhabit, but there can come a point where a performance is no longer possible. The fisherman and the boy keep this going until the very end. But the reader knows exactly what\u2019s going on\u2014and can see through his internal dialogue and his thoughts and the physical descriptions that he\u2019s terrified, and that he\u2019s failed. Not only will they die in the sea\u2014they will disappear into it. Hall makes a point of this. The death happens off-stage, and we see only the aftermath of it\u2014it\u2019s a technique Flannery O\u2019Connor uses too during moments of great violence, because the imagination of the event is so often more terrifying than the reality. But there\u2019s this image we get, which stayed with me forever, which is this starfish clinging to the fisherman\u2019s boot. Even this wriggling starfish conquered this man. It\u2019s such a pathetic moment for human beings.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s not the one that lingers. It\u2019s the fisherman\u2019s words before the sea enters his lungs and kills him. His son wants to know if it\u2019s time to swim. And all the fisherman says is, \u201cNot yet. Not just yet.\u201d I imagine that\u2019s what we all think when faced with our mortality and I like the way we can see the fisherman revise his thinking\u2014softening “not yet” not “not just yet.” The \u201cjust\u201d is there because he knows death is inevitable but he\u2019s begging anyway for that one extra moment with his son. We hear these words even into the white space. In this way, Hall has allowed them their own kind of immortality.<\/p>\n
To continue with the story, the language of physics didn\u2019t help me bridge that gap. There was an emptiness that physics couldn\u2019t help me dispel. Stories could, though. Talking to people wasn\u2019t enough, but if I could visit a world, and be held there in its arms, then I could invite others inside and maybe they could be held there too. So I changed my major from Physics to English. I think I actually cried when I filed the paperwork\u2014it was that scary to give up my whole plan and start on something new. But I was able to articulate writing something important I\u2019d never been able to say on my own before. And, of course, that\u2019s what literature does. In Chekhov\u2019s story \u201cThe Kiss,\u201d there\u2019s a moment that looms large in the main character\u2019s mind\u2014but when he\u2019s sitting around the fire with the other soldiers, and he tells them about the moment\u2014the moment of the kiss\u2014it comes out without the strength or significance it carried in his mind. The story just drops dead. I realized I\u2019d often felt that way, too: that when I tried to communicate with people, that bridge was not always forming. Writing was the first time I felt I could forge a connection that moved both ways, a two-way street between me and the rest of the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Article: ‘Life Keeps Changing’: Why Stories, Not Science, Explain the World by Joe Fassler in The Atlantic. The Text: The natural world is a source of wonder and even horror for Jennifer Percy, author of Demon Camp, but science can only explain so much. After Percy read Lawrence Sargent Hall\u2019s \u201cThe Ledge\u201d for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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![\"Stories](\"http:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/home-article-curation-carousel.jpg\")
<\/p>\n