2024-05-31 Journal Entry

Created: June 1, 2024 7:36 AM Tags: Daily

On the shapes of stories:

One of Kurt Vonnegut’s most famous talks is The Shape of Stories, in which he graphs out how stories work on two axes: good/ill fortune on the y-axis and time on the x-.

Of course these shapes are simple, elegant — curves up and down, a stair step pattern, the occasional parabola up to the heavens (or in the case of Kafka, down to hell). He calls these shapes beautiful, and to boot they’re “simple enough to be fed into computers,” and some of these simple stories are so good that every time we tell them someone “makes another million dollars, you’re welcome to do it,” Vonnegut tells us.

Are the shapes of our own lives this way?