The Fragility Of Belief

I'm currently reading Stephen King's meditation on horror Danse Macabre and one of the themes he returns to repeatedly is the idea of belief, the suspension of and the ability to. How important but tenuous belief can be in relating a tale, how as we age the more difficult it can be to give ourselves over to a story. But how important imagination and narrative are for us as kids but also, maybe even more vitally, as adults.

The sentiment echoes a lesson I learned when I was an angsty and unagreeable middle schooler. Every year from 5th to 8th grade I went to Camp Loan Oak which was a week long sleepover camp. A couple years I went there my sister was a counselor and I got to know the staff pretty well. One of her closest friends there Ted was my counselor one week when I was going into 7th grade. One night we were sitting around the camp fire roasting marshmallows for s'mores and telling ghost stories. The foreboding mood was heightened by the parks proximity to a graveyard.

After I and some of my fellow campers fumbled through paraphrased versions of Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark Ted told a "true story" about a counselor who, walking by the graveyard one evening, came upon a lost camper and gave her his sweatshirt, it being a cold evening, and as they cut through the graveyard on their way back to the lodge the camper disappeared. The sweatshirt was on a nearby grave, a kid who had died some thirty years before. Spooky. I was genuinely shaken and in an effort to bolster my non-existent courage I said "that didn't happen!" and made some joke which effectively deflated the eerie delicious atmosphere. I think some of us were relieved by my outburst but there was also a feeling of regret, something had been dispelled. Ted looked at me and said "No Steve. No it didn't." with such sarcastic scorn, such reproach and disappointment I felt like I'd been slapped. I was ashamed.

The next day Ted let it go and we were friends again but it stuck with me. Thinking about it Ted's story had cast a spell on us, we anxious and posturing 12 year olds, and I had broken the magic. And not because it was a bad story or poorly told but because it was successful, because I was truly scared. And had shied away from that precious precarious manifestation of imagination fearing as opposed to relishing how truly miraculous and fleeting it was.

Stories are not only entertainment they are solace and signpost, escape and enlightenment. And the belief we feel while watching a movie, reading a novel, or hearing a tale around a campfire is fragile and should be cultivated and respected. For without stories how would we face the bleak and mundane realities of life.