“What are the stars?”
No, not “big balls of gas” — that’s just their form.
Just as people aren’t blood and guts so are stars not big balls of gas.
What then are the stories? I started with two divergent thoughts —
There is only one plot: things
are not what they seem.
Jim Thompson
and
With a tale forsooth he cometh unto you — with
a tale which holdeth children from play, and
old men from the chimney corner.
Sir Philip Sidney
that converge —
Stories are not what they seem
and they spellbind us.
It’s excellent when such things overlap, and even more so when not just two ideas overlap but many ideas integrate. Says something about all sorts of things, specially in this case on stories.
*
There’s a danger of getting into this too much. Like a close reading of a poem that can kill the poem for people — or opening up a person’s body because one expects to find thereby what that person is.
But of course it doesn’t do that because it doesn’t work like that.
People and stars and stories are not what they seem.