"We breathe, we think, we conceive of our lives as narratives"
About this Quote
Lehmann-Haupt’s line treats storytelling less like an art form and more like a bodily function: as automatic as breathing, as intimate as thought. The move is sly. By stacking “we breathe, we think” alongside “we conceive of our lives as narratives,” he smuggles narrative out of the library and into the nervous system. Story isn’t a hobby; it’s infrastructure. That’s the intent: to argue that narrative isn’t an optional lens we apply after the fact, but the default setting through which we experience time, memory, and selfhood.
The subtext carries a warning, too. If we “conceive” our lives as narratives, we’re also editing them. We cast ourselves as protagonists, recruit villains, invent arcs, prune contradictions. Narrative gives shape and meaning, but it also flatters and distorts. It can turn contingency into destiny, coincidence into “signs,” pain into “character development.” In a culture that prizes coherence, the pressure to turn life into a clean plot can become its own kind of tyranny.
Context matters: Lehmann-Haupt was a prominent book critic, someone professionally invested in how stories work on readers. Coming from that world, the sentence doubles as a defense of literature’s relevance. If humans are narrative-making creatures by nature, then novels, memoirs, and journalism aren’t escapism; they’re high-resolution versions of what our minds already do. The line lands because it’s both modest and expansive: it reduces the grand concept of “life story” to a reflex, then uses that reflex to elevate the stakes of reading and interpretation.
The subtext carries a warning, too. If we “conceive” our lives as narratives, we’re also editing them. We cast ourselves as protagonists, recruit villains, invent arcs, prune contradictions. Narrative gives shape and meaning, but it also flatters and distorts. It can turn contingency into destiny, coincidence into “signs,” pain into “character development.” In a culture that prizes coherence, the pressure to turn life into a clean plot can become its own kind of tyranny.
Context matters: Lehmann-Haupt was a prominent book critic, someone professionally invested in how stories work on readers. Coming from that world, the sentence doubles as a defense of literature’s relevance. If humans are narrative-making creatures by nature, then novels, memoirs, and journalism aren’t escapism; they’re high-resolution versions of what our minds already do. The line lands because it’s both modest and expansive: it reduces the grand concept of “life story” to a reflex, then uses that reflex to elevate the stakes of reading and interpretation.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meaning of Life |
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