"183
Carpenters restore old homes to their architectural and design period, 
not knowing the original color of the walls. If restoring a home is like 
writing a nonfiction narrative, and if choosing the paint for one wall 
is like imagining one moment in the larger story, shouldn't we 
acknowledge that the house and its walls were in fact never one 
particular way? On a single wall, sometimes wallpaper hung, sometimes 
paintings stared, sometimes children penned their names, sometimes flies 
sat, sometimes dust settled, sometimes sunlight blazed, sometimes 
fingerprints shimmered. The lost story the carpenter tries to restore 
isn't one particular story, but a pool of possible tales, with different 
perspectives from different characters, told at different times for 
different reasons. The nonfiction writer who works to revive a lost 
scene adds one similar story to the collection of stories that ever 
existed for that moment. The entire platform of my imagination — my 
purpose, my hope, my intent — is different from that of a fiction 
writer's. I don't seek to tell the best story. I seek to tell a story 
that once was. I seek to fill a place that once had meaning with meaning 
again." David Shields, Reality Hunger p 61

There is something soppy in the 'paintings stared' in the above graph 
that grates on me. One of the phenomena that has been amazing me of late 
is the number of people in our culture taught to make stories but who 
have very little experience of making anything else.

][<en

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