Narrators and Stories

"Have you never considered how strange, how hard a thing it is for a narrator to outlive his story? The incidents it was his sole purpose to record, all finished; the actors all gone, doing other things, or dead; all the apostrophes and periods in place; even the book itself, perhaps, neatly on a shelf--what then? 'Move on,' his friends may say. Well; but to what? What else can equal? And more: Can he ever feel himself the equal of what he was before, when he was in the story?"

Conversations with Myself, by Michael Kei Stewart

April 8 2015