If you live long enough you start to notice that so many stories are examples of a bit more general story that lives at a deeper level in the mind than its exemplars and that stories of all kinds can be seen as attempts to map some of the more challenging or inscrutable regions of the psyche sometimes these maps are rendered with great skill and artistry and I’m filled with admiration and awe when I read them or hear them told and if you live longer still you notice that even the deeper-level and more general stories are examples of still deeper stories and so on and eventually you might see that at bottom there is only one story that is the ancestor of all stories and it goes all the way down deep into our foundational common humanness and it has this general theme IS THERE A PLACE FOR ME IN THIS WORLD
