Old Roads: The Stories That Shape You

In my earlier essays, I briefly touched on how the stories you experience can stay with you, can become close friends, can feel like home. Whether you experience them through movies, TV shows, books, or by listening to someone speak, they become part of you, sometimes without your even knowing it.

It happens to me all the time. Just the other day, when I was, shall we say, debating with my editor about the content of a previous essay, after he questioned the phrase “the warm embrace of a close friend returning for a visit," suggesting “close friend” might read as a little sentimental, I responded:

"This is not just some dwarf over for tea, this is Gandalf."

The depth of layered cultural influence on that one statement alone is staggering. All of it absorbed from stories I have experienced. So much so that I didn't even realize them all for a few days.

Obviously, there is the reference to The Hobbit in dwarf and Gandalf, layered on top of the lesser importance of say, Balin, or Dwalin compared to Gandalf. But later I realized that the entire statement grew out of a line I took to heart from The West Wing (season 3, episode 20), when President Bartlet says to his advisors, after hearing their evidence against Qumari Minister of Defense Abdul Shareef, and deciding it was not enough to assassinate him "This is no cave dweller, this is Capone."

I was not cribbing it, I was not consciously using the line. The phrase, the meaning behind it, has become part of my normal way of thinking now. It has become part of me (as most of the first four seasons of The West Wing have). My thought processes (my decision making paradigm if you will) have been permanently changed, for the better I believe, by The West Wing and other stories that, as I have said, I return to because they feel like home.

So much of how I think, what I say, or what I write, has been directly, if unconsciously, influenced by those stories that feel like home to me. I find myself slipping into Bartlet, or Zeigler (I do that a LOT without realizing it), into Linus Van Pelt (Peanuts is another cozy armchair beside a hearth), or into David Lightman, even into WOPR ("The only winning move, is not to play.")

I use the parables I hear, see, or read, when I see a need for them in the real world. So many great parables come out of the West Wing alone. "The man who lived by the river", "The guy who fell into a hole", and "Abu Al Banat" (as a man who has a daughter, this one is a personal favorite of mine). There are so many others though. The Newsroom is another show that feels like home to me and it has its own set of parables that come up from time to time. The final speech in the American President is another wonderful, memorable, and thought changing story that shapes me, again I think, for the better.

If you see a pattern here, yes. Aaron Sorkin is one of my favorite writers. He can turn language into momentum like any ten people. But it isn't just his writing. It's the writing, the directing, the acting. All of it comes together to make stories that really speak to me.

J. R. R. Tolkien is another writer that shapes my soul. The Hobbit has been, and will continue to be the homiest of homes to me. Not because it's considered to be such a classic or so momentous, but because it speaks directly to the nine year old who read it for the first time when his own adventures into the wide world were about to begin.

The line Gandalf spoke to Bilbo "The world is not in your books and maps. It's out there!" is a thought that festered in me ever since I first read it. I still spend far too much time in books, and probably not coincidentally, in maps instead of being out in the world. The world is, however, a dangerous and scary place but the books, movies, and shows that feel like home are a safe and comfortable sitting room with snacks and a fine single malt (Islay, of course). I think I will stay here for a while.

Till next time,
John