Stories are ways of telling others who I am.  But are
there  limits to narrative?

“You cannot tell me who I am, and I cannot tell you who
you are. If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify
you?

That brings us to the second problem.  Although in the
end  we alone are capable of experiencing who we are, we are instinctively
gifted in watching how others experience themselves.  We learn to

life by living together with others, and by living like them—- a
process which has disadvantages as well as blessings.

The greatest disadvantage is that we are too prone to
welcome everybody else’s wrong solution to the problem of life…
a natural laziness… that is why an optimistic view of life is
not necessarily always a virtuous thing…In a world where every
lie has currency, is not anxiety the more real and more human
reaction?

Now anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.  It is the
fruit of unanswered questions…  One of the moral diseases we
communicate to one another in society comes from huddling together
in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are
afraid to ask.”

-Thomas Merton, NO MAN IS AN ISLAND