Strawson's arguments against the narrativity paradigm

are just what we need in order to envigorate a complacent and boring debate about identity and narrativity. He claims the following, and I cite from the intro to his article AGAINST NARRATIVITY.
"The first is a descriptive, empirical thesis about the nature of ordinary human experience: ‘each of us constructs and lives a “narrative” . . . this narrative is us, our identities’ (Oliver Sacks); ‘self is a perpetually rewritten story . . . in the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives’ (Jerry Bruner); ‘we are all virtuoso novelists.
. . . We try to make all of our material cohere into a single good story. And that story is our autobiography. The chief fictional character . . . of that autobiography is one’s self’ (Dan Dennett).
The second is a normative, ethical claim: we ought to live our lives narratively, or as a story; a ‘basic condition of making sense of ourselves is that we grasp our lives in a narrative’ and have an understanding of our lives ‘as an unfolding story’ (Charles Taylor). A person ‘creates his identity [only] by forming an autobiographical narrative – a story of his life’, and must be in possession of a full and ‘explicit narrative [of his life] to develop fully as a person’ (Marya Schechtman)."

thanks to the coincidences

of a day I bumped into both Galen Strawson, Michel Houellebecq, Vendela Vida and Nick Hornby within the span of 15 minutes this Friday morning. It started with an intervjue with Mrs. Vida in Klassekampen, who was said to write for the California based magazine The Believer which I happened to remember from Nick Hornby's book THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE. And as I read on in the interview I was introduced to the philosopher Galen Strawson who claims, in his essay AGAINST NARRATIVITY, that there are two types of people (Oh! these endless dicotomies): those who look upon life as a coherent story, and those who experience life as a series of incoherent episodes. And I immediately felt I belonged to the last group, even if these make up only 5% of us, according to Strawson. Then Michel Houellebecq comes in because he is one of the authors mentioned in this particular issue of The Believer. He writes: “Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.”
So why are all those people who are writing and talking about life and the world those that are fed up with it. They seem to care though.

I have been chopping wood

lately, and today I finished what I had brought home and arranged it in piles to dry during the summer. Part of it goes to the cabin, part to my daughter's house and part to myself at home. It is a good feeling to watch the newly cut and piled wood.