For Carlos’s mother, that day came three years later. In 1965, she left Cuba for Illinois, where Carlos and his brother were living with their uncle. Carlos’s father was forced to stay behind in Cuba. By then, Carlos’s life was very different. When they first came to America, Tony and Carlos had been living in a roach-infested orphanage in Florida, where they were served one meal a day and harassed by the other orphans. Life was slightly better in Illinois. But because their mother could not speak English and was disabled—she had a bad leg due to childhood polio—Tony and Carlos had to work to support both her and themselves. When he was fifteen, Carlos lied about his age and got a job washing dishes at the Conrad Hilton hotel in Chicago. From Wednesday through Sunday, he worked at the hotel from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. He had only a few hours of sleep before getting up for school, where classmates called him a “spic.” The pampered life he had lived in Havana seemed like a distant dream.
When Carlos was fifty years old, the news broke that a young Cuban boy, Elián González, had washed up on a shore in Florida, precipitating an international crisis. A historian at Yale University by then, Carlos was living a happy and stable life in Connecticut with his wife and three children. He rarely thought about his early life in Cuba. But González’s story opened a dam in Carlos’s mind. Out of the dam came a flood of childhood memories. He felt compelled to write them down and assemble them together into a memoir to make sense of what had happened to him and his family.
During that process, Carlos thought a lot about the life he lost. In his memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana, he considers “what might have been” had the revolution not occurred, or had Castro been quickly overthrown. He imagines that the Bay of Pigs had been successful. He imagines Castro “lined up against a wall and shot with blanks for days on end,” enduring the same psychological terror to which he subjected prisoners. He imagines staying in Havana rather than fleeing to the United States. He imagines himself as a young man applying cream to his hair and heading to the Havana clubs. He imagines attending the funeral of his father, whom Carlos never saw again after saying goodbye to him at the Havana airport in the spring of 1962.
“I don’t know if it’s possible to think of future nostalgia,” he said. “But I do sometimes get nostalgic for the future I could have had. What would my life have been like? What kind of person would I have been? What would my relationship to my father have been like? I wouldn’t have had this total break between my childhood and adulthood. I would have had a seamless life.” His life without the revolution would have been much easier and more carefree, he believes—it would have been a life free of the worries and hardships he had to endure as a teenager, free of the bouts of depression he experienced as an adult, free of the anger he felt for the communists who destroyed his childhood, free of financial worry. “Yes,” he said, “it would have been an easier life. But does that mean it would have been a better life? I don’t think so. I’m old enough now that I understand that the break was a good thing. It made me who I am.”
When Carlos left Cuba as a ten-year-old, he had just learned how to tie his own shoelaces, had never done any chores around his house, had never cut his own meat, and had never spent a night away from home. He had zero survival skills. In America, he had to learn how to take care of himself. Adversity also led to “moral growth,” he said. “I got to experience what it’s like to be at the bottom,” he explained, “and that has shaped my perspective on everything. It’s given me a certain kind of empathy for people who are at the bottom, and for understanding how unfair their situations can be.”
Carlos lost a lot. But what he lost has been offset by what he has gained—which also includes a family, a meaningful career, and faith in God.
The University of Missouri’s Laura King has spent much of her career trying to understand how narrative can help us make sense of our lost lives. In the late 1990s, she studied three groups of adults who had experienced challenges: parents of children with Down syndrome, gay men and lesbians who have come out of the closet, and women who got divorced after twenty years or more of marriage. Though she was studying people in specific circumstances, they all shared the universal human experience of loss.
King asked these three groups of research subjects to write two versions of the story of their future—the narrative of their current “best possible self,” or how they hoped their lives would unfold, and the counterfactual narrative of their “lost possible self,” the self that could have been had they not had to inhabit a difficult role. For example, gay men and lesbians wrote about their lives as if they were straight, while divorced women wrote about their lives as if they were still married. After they responded to the two prompts, they completed a questionnaire indicating how much they thought about each of these versions of themselves.
King found that the more people thought about their current future self, the happier they were. Visions of this future give hope because they are within reach. However, the more people thought about their lost possible self, the unhappier they were. At the time of King’s research, discrimination against gays and lesbians was more pronounced than it is today. In no state could same-sex couples marry or enter into a civil union. And so coming out could represent a real loss. For gay men and lesbians, thinking frequently about the paths closed off to them led to distress and regret—they realized that a so-called normal life free of discrimination and other obstacles would have been so much easier than the life they were living. The same pattern held true for divorced women.
As both groups found, dwelling on “what might have been” can be an emotionally painful process. At the same time, though, this kind of counterfactual thinking led people to delve into their own humanity. Writing about the lost self in a detailed and complicated way, King found, was associated with more ego development among gays, lesbians, and divorced women two years after they responded to the prompt. Ego development measures how an individual sees and interprets reality—the extent to which they are able “to master, to integrate, and make sense of experience,” to think about themselves and the world in complex ways. In other words, it’s a measure of emotional depth, something that becomes clear in the stories King collected for her research. One gay man wrote this narrative about his lost possible self as a straight man:
As I was growing up, I envisioned my life to be like the lives of those I admired. Those lives were something to aspire to. I grew up in a small town….My parents and their friends were involved in volunteer work, owned businesses, and were active in community politics. My dream was to be a veterinarian. I imagined that I was married (as that is what is supposed to happen). I dreamed that my wife would be the manager of the pet store we both owned….We would be active in the community. Small towns can be so much fun….I would be well-known as someone who is a good person and down to earth….The business would be successful and eventually passed down to our children.
People who wrote detailed, thoughtful narratives like this one—people who almost seemed nostalgic for the future, as Carlos would put it—had clearly thought a great deal about the path that was now closed off to them. Reconciling themselves to that loss was a difficult process, but a necessary one that left a positive mark on the lives they ended up living. “Avoiding thinking about loss may be one way to be happy,” as King writes, “but it may also preclude the kind of examination necessary for growth.”
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The stories we tell about ourselves help us understand who we are, how our lives developed, and how they could have unfolded differently. But we also find meaning in stories told by others. Whether in fiction or film, on the radio or on the stage, stories about others can help us reflect on our own values and experiences.
Consider the novel Life of Pi. It tells the story of a teenage boy named Pi, who, in the aftermath of a shipwreck that has killed his family, finds himself aboard a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, a spotted hyena, an injured zebra, and a kind orangutan. Soon after being at sea, chaos breaks loose on the lifeboat: Pi watch
es in horror as the hyena decapitates and eats the helpless zebra, and then kills the orangutan. The butchery continues when the tiger kills and eats the hyena.
That leaves Pi and the tiger alone aboard the boat. Lost in the Pacific Ocean for 227 days, starved, desperate, and forced into a game of survival with the tiger, Pi pushes forward, even though he has lost everything. Pi’s story of resilience is incredible once you realize what really happened on board the lifeboat. The animals, it turns out, were symbols for real people. Pi’s mother was the orangutan; the zebra was an injured sailor; and the hyena was the ship’s loathsome cook, who cannibalized the sailor and killed Pi’s mother. Pi, we learn, was the tiger. He killed the cook and ate his liver and heart.
Pi’s showdown with the tiger was really a confrontation he had with himself. After relating what happened to the zebra, hyena, and orangutan, Pi explains how he tamed the ferocious tiger that killed and ate the hyena. This parallels what truly happened: after ruthlessly killing the cook, Pi learned to control his own base impulses. Telling the story of the tiger allowed Pi to dissociate himself from the savagery he saw and committed. Only through doing so was he able to find meaning in the events that unfolded on the boat.
Research has shown that fiction can help people who have endured loss and trauma cope with their experiences. Reading tragic stories allows them to process what happened to them while maintaining distance from their painful memories and emotions. Alone on the lifeboat, Pi does something similar: he uses a fable to work through an experience that was too difficult to face in reality. For Pi, telling the story of the tiger’s growth was a way to understand his own. Just as the tiger learned to control his violent nature with the discipline of a master, Pi developed a set of spiritual, emotional, and physical qualities that helped him survive the months he spent at sea before washing up on a beach in Mexico. “The world isn’t just the way it is,” as Pi says. “It is how we understand it, no?”
We don’t need to have experienced a trauma like Pi’s, of course, to gain wisdom from fiction. In a study published in 2002, David Miall and Don Kuiken of the University of Alberta asked participants to read the short story “The Trout” by Seán Ó Faoláin. The story is about a twelve-year-old girl named Julia who discovers a trout stuck inside a tiny pool of water near her family’s summer home. The image of the trout thrashing around in “his tiny prison” haunts her. One night, she decides to set it free. She gets out of bed, ventures down to the pool in her pajamas, places the trout into a jug, and then runs to the river to release him into the water.
After the participants read the story, they were invited to think out loud about its most evocative parts. One reader saw her young self in Julia. She felt, she said, “a real kinship with her.” As a young girl, she said, she would have wanted to save the trout, too. This reader was surprised, the researchers point out, by her admiration of Julia. “It recalled a sometimes submerged ‘heroic’ aspect of her younger self,” they write. Another reader commented that Julia’s decision to save the trout represented her “first step towards maturity.” He added, as if from experience, that becoming mature does not happen overnight; it takes time. “You’re not aware that you’re becoming mature,” he said, “until many years down the road when you look back and you can understand what was happening to you.” These readers were most moved by the parts of Julia’s story that related to their own narratives. As a result of reading “The Trout,” they gained more insight into themselves.
Like the participants in “The Trout” study, the audience members at The Moth were deeply affected by the tales they heard the night Erik shared his story about Kate—and for the same reason. “You know, in the intermission I saw a friend who was really touched by a story from the first half,” said David Crabb, the emcee. He was referring to a story that one of that night’s storytellers told about the death of her mother. “And she was tearful,” Crabb continued, “talking about someone she lost and how it made her connect more with that feeling and that memory.”
The Moth has attracted all kinds of storytellers, including a former White House press secretary, an astronaut, Salman Rushdie, and Malcolm Gladwell. But no matter who is telling the story, the effect on the audience is always the same when the stories are told well. The stories that “levitate the room” have, as The New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik has put it, “some last rising touch, a note of pathos or self-recognition or poetic benediction, to lift the story, however briefly, into the realm of fable or symbol.” By sharing their stories with the audience, storytellers aren’t just creating meaning for themselves—they’re helping others do so, too. “And that’s why storytelling is so important,” continued Crabb. “I think some people think it’s all about talking about you, you, you. But what it really is is reaching out into the void and connecting with people and letting them know they’re not alone.”
I flew from New York to San Antonio and then drove another seven hours west through the land of rattlesnakes and armadillos, cowboys and cattle to make it to the McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, Texas. The Chihuahuan Desert, which reaches from West Texas down to Mexico, is one of the largest in North America, and one of the least forgiving. Hundreds of miles separate cities of any size. You can drive along a major road for hours without seeing another car, or any other sign of life. At high noon, when I stopped for lunch, it was 96 degrees outside. By nighttime, the mercury had fallen to 34.
The final leg of the journey passed through the dramatic peaks and valleys of the Davis Mountains. El Paso, the nearest major city, was now about 200 miles away. As I wound my way up to the top of one of those mountains, the three great white domes of the McDonald Observatory appeared. Resting at an elevation of over 6,000 feet—the highest point that can be reached by car on the Texas highways—the telescopes form a desert acropolis. At night, they sit beneath some of the darkest skies in the continental United States—so black that after the sun and moon have set, you can’t even see your hand when you hold it in front of your face.
This seemingly barren corner of the world was the last place I would expect to find hundreds of people coming together for a transcendent experience. But on the cool and clear night in July that I visited McDonald, five hundred others had journeyed to the observatory for its famed “star party” in order to reenact one of the oldest rituals known to man—stargazing.
At 9:45 p.m., the sky was dark. It was time to begin. A guide led us down a dimly lit path that zigzagged past a dozen telescopes toward an amphitheater. Huddled together with the other stargazers, I looked up to see the sky stretching uninterrupted from one horizon to the other like a great big dome over us. At first, there were just a handful of stars visible in the sky. A few minutes later, there were suddenly hundreds.
Most of the stars we saw were hundreds of millions of years old and dozens of light-years away—and some were much farther. Looking at them means looking back in time: because they are so distant from Earth, it takes many years for the light they emit to finally reach our eyes, which means that when we see stars in the sky, we are seeing them as they existed years ago. Even Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to our own solar system, is 26 trillion miles away from us; when it one day burns up and dies, observers on Earth (assuming there are any) will only find out four and a half years after the fact.
Our guide, Frank, started the “constellation tour” by pointing out the Big Dipper, which is part of Ursa Major, the Big Bear. The Big Dipper points to Polaris, the North Star, in the constellation Ursa Minor, the Little Bear. For years, Frank explained, “civilizations have seen this constellation as a bear.” There’s reason to believe, he went on, “that the Europeans and Native Americans, without knowing of the other, both saw the same animal in these random dots in the sky. From an anthropological perspective, that’s very interesting.”
Each civilization attached a story to these stars, too. In ancient Greece and Rome, the story of the two bears begins with the ever-lusty Zeus. The great god wanted to seduce the beautiful n
ymph Callisto, who as a follower of the virgin goddess Artemis had taken a vow of chastity. Zeus, not to be deterred, disguised himself as Artemis, approached Callisto, and forced himself upon her. Later, when Artemis saw that Callisto was pregnant, she furiously banished the nymph from her circle. Wandering in the woods, alone and vulnerable, Callisto gave birth to a son, Arcas. Soon after, Zeus’s wife Hera, in a fit of jealousy, took revenge on Callisto by transforming her into a bear. Years later, when Callisto, as a bear, came upon her son Arcas in the woods, he nearly killed her. But Zeus then stepped in to (sort of) clean up the mess he had made. He transformed Arcas into a smaller bear and then threw both big bear and little bear up into the night sky.
To the ancient Greek and Roman people, this myth communicated some important lessons about being human. Our fate, as mortals, lies in the hands of capricious gods. Contact with a divine being can lead to immortality in the heavens above—unless, of course, it leads to savage death, like in the myth of Actaeon, who was torn to pieces by his hounds after Artemis transformed him into a stag. The cosmos is a chaotic, unpredictable place for us.
“One of the things you’ll see in the telescopes tonight,” Frank explained, “is the Ring Nebula, which we call the ‘Cosmic Cheerio’ around here.” The nebula is the remains of a star whose center has released its gas into space so that it looks like a ring. “This is what’s going to happen to our sun eventually,” Frank said, “but not for a long time.”
He then drew our attention to the southwest portion of the sky, where Mars and Saturn were visible as prominent red and yellow dots of light. As he was describing Saturn’s rings, a meteor flew by. The crowd gasped in wonder. A little boy called out, “That was the first shooting star I ever saw!”
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