There’s a story for everything. When I feel that I just can’t make it through another day because my world has gone so utterly wrong I remember Joe Bonham.

“He thought if I never have anything else I will always have dawn and morning sunlight.” – Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun

This was only a thought since he had no mouth with which to speak. He couldn’t sign, tap his fingers, or wiggle his toes without the arms and legs to hold them. He couldn’t blink his eyes for he had none. He only knew the sun’s presence since it would warm his body through the window while he lay in his hospital bed. He recognized dawn because life started moving briskly around him and he remembered the ways of the world before the war took that world away. Ever since 9th grade English class, Joe was my misery litmus test. Was I worse off than Joe? Of course I wasn’t. Thank God. Then that meant that it was going to be okay, or even if it wasn’t okay, I would keep living. Giving up just wasn’t something you did. Even when you worked hard and the world told you no, as long as you were alive there was still living to do.

“What’s so noble about being dead?”
― Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun

On the days when I wish that everyone would be good a person, there’s Ursula K. LeGuin’s George Orr and Anthony Burgess’ Alex DeLarge to set me straight on unintended consequences and free will.

“The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“She could not have been born gray. Her
color, her color of brown, was an essential part of her, not an accident. Her anger, timidity, brashness, gentleness, all were elements of her mixed being, her mixed
nature, dark and clear right through, like Baltic amber. She could not exist in the gray people’s world. She had not been born.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

When I would feel like the only one struggling along in life, classes would assign me to read the stories of struggles so common that they are accepted as universal and timeless. Some troubles are common enough to be predictable. I read up to page 5 or so in Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter and didn’t have to read another word to know exactly how that tale would go. The world is the world after all.

“Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!” whispered her mother. “We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Shakespeare’s Romeo offered an example of what not to do and Juliet followed the example proving it true. If these hadn’t been set as coursework I would have ignored them on the shelves as I looked for newer titles. I tend to live for the search of something new.

“A glooming peace this morning with it brings.

The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head.

Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things.

Some shall be pardoned, and some punishèd.

For never was a story of more woe

Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.” – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

There are also stories for every victory. There are tales of great quests.

But my favorite ones of all are the ones that have grown with time and tide. They started with firelight, their details and deeds growing with each retelling. There was a king. The King loved the land and the people loved their king. With each storyteller, the legends grew until it became hard to find the facts within the fancy. King Arthur, his knights, his lady wife. Tales of the Green Man, beheading games, and knights with fair hands mixing together with tales of the fairy folk, giants, and the mythical Elven lands. They started in the shadows of history from Beowulf to Tolkien and on to Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden, but they continue to change in the way that we tell them, while the cores of the stories remain the same.

“…and then the threw the sword as far into the water as he might; and there came an arm and a hand above the water and met it, and caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished, and then vanished away the hand with the sword in the water.”
― Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte d’Arthur: King Arthur and the Legends of the Round Table

“It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“The world is getting weirder. Darker every single day. Things are spinning around faster and faster, and threatening to go completely awry. Falcons and falconers. The center cannot hold. But in my corner of the country, I’m trying to nail things down. I don’t want to live in Victor’s jungle, even if it did eventually devour him. I don’t want to live in a world where the strong rule and the weak cower. I’d rather make a place where things are a little quieter. Where trolls stay the hell under their bridges and where elves don’t come swooping out to snatch children from their cradles. Where vampires respect the limits, and where the faeries mind their p’s and q’s. My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk. When things get strange, when what goes bump in the night flicks on the lights, when no one else can help you, give me a call. I’m in the book.” – Jim Butcher, Storm Front

Stories are lies that try to tell the greater truths. When they succeed they stand rooted in the commonalities of human experience. No matter the language used, a good story can be understood by nearly anyone who reads, or hears, it. As the reader grows the vocabulary of their own experiences, they can return to stories they once read and read them again seeing something entirely new. Without those English Literature classes I doubt I would have voluntarily read so many of the authors and books that I have cast-on to my heart.