I'm far too tired for dark humor this afternoon

As if the tension between France and America weren't overwrought yet, now we're running over French tourists! This would be horrible even without the political backdrop, which, who knows, these two girls might not have cared a thing about. As it stands now, though, and maybe this is just with my sick mind, the sadness of the story stands a good chance of being overshadowed -- tragically, yes, but inevitably -- by the larger mechanisms of human existence that provide us with, and compel us to repeat -- in our quixotic efforts to deal with suffering and sadness, be they personal or otherwise, with irony -- poorly-paced jokes and strained analogies attempting to showcase the foibles of France and America.

Off the beaten path -- some preparatory, oblique thoughts that relate to tragedy, inevitability, and the stories we must continue telling ourselves and others. In this, I'm coming to realize, though maybe not completely understand, the slice of life that illustrates the Whole of life is itself also illustrated by the Whole; subject and object coalesce in a strange reflection that can only ever be lived, that is, can only ever be illustrated anew. To put it another way, the unity that we must assume lies outside a story -- let's say, an author or narrator -- without which we'd have no way of knowing anything in particular was being illustrated at all, this unity itself can only ever be known as illustration / reflection (i.e., not directly). For a lot of people in the humanities, and in some segments of philosophy, this means that illustration begets illustration, signs upon signs upon signs, aka nothing but stories. When expressed so blithely, as it often is, this is outright bollocks; and in a way I don't think I've conveyed clearly at all, the above story got me thinking about why.

First, two questions: (1) Why do we tell stories? If indeed a story is begat by another story which is begat by another story, etc., (2) how then do we tell stories at all, as stories? Doesn't the "as" imply something outside the cycle of stories?

My reply is very cryptic, I'm afraid, but I'll flesh it out someday if anybody is interested at all. If an individual life, and thus a world, can be characterized as a story, as I've suggested before and as I've hinted above, the implications go beyond theoretical, self-help, and religious wanking. In short, life as story would be a fiction that evolves as it is re-read and re-written (i.e., as it is interpreted & lived ["live and learn, doll"]); as such, it is a story that is seemingly random and chaotic -- for some exhilerating, for others disturbing -- but one that is all the same marked by an ineluctable (spiritual? pragmatic?) coherence that makes it legible; and finally, a story whose continued motion is its striving -- which, importantly, assumes the promise of the goal as much as it does its continued failure -- for the immediacy and the freedom of a narrator's repose.