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The arc of a bow and its arrow are our primitive reference for fully understanding the entropy that life entails. An entropy that overwhelms—or bores, depending on so many things—even the brightest minds. I imagine this is the origin of the narrative arc of a story: cutting through space like an arrow of time.

Zeno of Elea believed that time was merely a sum of static, frozen moments, failing to realize that time and motion are continuous and cannot be suspended or divided into parts. Although the mind can divide space into fixed points, according to Bergson, movement itself is pure duration.

Hence the stories we tell ourselves in the present—that mixture of vanity and an obsession to spin. The falser they are, the simpler their narrative arc, and the more self-serving are their omissions—but truth floats on water like oil does. Cave paintings in France and Indonesia show that hunting images served the first storytellers long before religion centered on gods—those invisible friends with a thousand faces who eventually spread across five continents with varied rites and sacrifices designed to keep them on our side.

Because even with these contrivances to ward off the fear of the dark, life was devastatingly tragic, often ending before it had truly begun. Before the advent of hygiene and antibiotics, the elderly were revered simply for surviving the chaos and uncertainty that so many others paid with their lives.

The rite of passage belongs to the common monomyth of the hero. To stay alive and awake, he sheds fear like old skin to make room for indispensable courage, successfully confronting whatever harsh trials cross his path. We endow these figures with extraordinary powers, eventually worshiping them as icons and statues.

The oldest texts are sacred—holy, canonical books. We see it in the Book of the Dead written on papyrus scrolls, or the spells chiseled into the stone of Egyptian sarcophagi three thousand five hundred years ago to guide a pharaoh’s great journey to the beyond. Yet the Sumerian tablets, carrying the gripping tale of the last king before the Great Flood instructing his heir on piety, ethics, and social order, sink another thousand years deeper into the night of time.

From this incessant work of mapping our anxieties for the afterlife, we gradually birthed arts of magnificent depth and beauty, moving further and further away from religious issues and limitations. We now have music on demand, paintings to decipher, theater and cinema to watch. And books, when read without distractions, light up like fireflies.

I confess a deep fondness for modernist novels, where storytelling doesn’t devolve into an inventory of infinite trivialities, but functions as a spell for crossing that river of time. I think of Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Sound and the Fury. But above all, I think of Proust, fragmenting the Self and prioritizing involuntary memory over the ticking of a clock. It is no coincidence that in 1928, just as literature was fracturing chronology, Arthur Eddington coined the term “the arrow of time” to illustrate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. He noted that because entropy is always increasing, the universe has a distinct, irreversible direction.

These reflections invariably lead me to my own second rite of passage: the fertile prospect of crossing the very same threshold I stood before thirty years ago. What I mean to say is that I still believe writing fiction is the passion that anchors my life. But for the first time, I have a clear, realistic idea of how to escape the bleak landscape of a missing readership, due to the collapse of sustained reading. More importantly, I finally possess the tools to do so with true craftsmanship.

Oral storytelling is more effective than the written word. Your hearing is more laser-focused and detailed while your eyes have to deal with visual fatigue and that weak focus of the