The power of story and Quin's first day of class

The story theme continues in this section as Quin begins teaching his classes. This section revolves around what Quin once believed about stories but no longer does...


His new office was a small, square windowless room painted institutional white at the end of the hall of the English department.  He always chuckled a little bit under his breath when it was called “The Department.”  “The Department" consisted of three drab middle-aged individuals who smelled constantly of tobacco smoke and occasionally of alcohol.  There were two males and one female, who was the department head.  After his formal interview with the college president and the dean, he had had an informal interview with the three of them.  They had peppered him with cynical questions about literature and prying questions about his personal life.  One of the males remembered him as a pitcher for Appendix and had tried without success to get Quin to tell some exciting baseball stories.

In the end, they had assigned him the Literature classes, because in their middle-aged cynicism they had become convinced that really the only worthwhile thing to teach in language was the proper grammar of written communication.  "All they're after, Quin, is the ability to write a resume that does not make them look like a moron."  It was in this department that Quin took up his post as Associate Professor of Literature.


First Day of Class
Any class of literature he had ever taught, he had begun the same way with what he called his “power of the story” lecture. Basically he simply regurgitated an old paper that he had written as an undergraduate. The paper was about the importance of stories, and how society as a whole was in trouble because it had lost its connecting narrative. It had been a good paper for an undergrad. His professor had given him an A minus, and told him that the paper would have received an A, if it had not been a week late.

He always felt a little proud when he read it over as he prepped for classes, but at the same time was always somewhat embarrassed by the naiveté and the passion expressed in the paper. So, he toned down the passion and added what he hoped was a bit of realism, but mostly it was the same paper he had written twenty years ago when he was a bright kid who thought he was in love and knew he could throw a baseball really hard.

It always began the same. “Good Morning, I am Professor Quin Holsten. I would like you to call me Quin, because I am not above you, but someone who is merely on a journey with you. A journey in the pursuit of truth, it is a dangerous journey, but a journey that is completely rewarding.”

He did not believe a word of the beginning, but he could present it with such flair that he just could not bring himself to cut it. After the dramatic beginning the presentation lagged a little bit. It lagged when he told the students that he would like to assign them seats, so that he could better learn their names as they journeyed together. That of course was a lie. His department head had demanded that he take roll every day and a seating chart was the easiest way to take care of the task.

After the brief lull for the seating chart business, the presentation began again, and once again Quin launched into his performance, “So we are today embarking on this perilous journey in the hope of finding truth. We are searching for the truth about the world around us, and the truth about our society. We are looking for the truth about our friends, and the most dangerous of all, the truth about ourselves.  The vehicle for our journey is story. We are the sum total of our stories. Our society is the sum total of our collective stories. In fact that is why society seems to be coming apart at the seams. We’ve forgotten our stories, and we’re beginning to doubt that it is even possible to tell a story that would make sense of it all. We are lacking what our friends in the philosophy department would call the metanarrative. The metanarrative is the one great connecting story that holds all other stories together.”

“We in this class are going to set out on a journey for the Big Truth capital T, for the metanarrative, by telling lots of little stories, mini-narratives, and by listening to many little narratives. When we do we will discover that the Truth, big T, is found in listening to our own truths, little t, found in our own little stories.

“The very date is a testimony to the power of stories. We live in the year 2003 AD. The date harkens back to a storyteller. Jesus was probably one, if not the greatest teachers of truth to ever walk the earth and the reason that he was such a great teacher was that he was a great storyteller. What his stories did was to give hope to his audience that they too could be caught up in a story. In the end people who wished to subdue the truth killed him, because they didn’t like the truth that his stories revealed about them. But killing him did not prevent his stories from living on, because there is power in stories.”

Quin really warmed up during this part of his lecture, invariably he thought, “how broadminded and inspiring I sound” and at the same time he heard a little nagging grating voice, “you’re a scoundrel you don’t believe a word of this.”

“I challenge each of you to begin to honestly listen to the truth that is hidden in your story. Your first assignment is the telling of your story. Three pages typed double-spaced.”

Quin loved making the speech, but within minutes of finishing he was already dreading having to read the papers that would be turned in. They would be a series of random events with no connection, most likely poorly written, and even more poorly punctuated. He grew depressed just thinking about it. He knew that there was no way that the silly little small “t” random events that these kids would turn into him would add up to anything like a big “T.”  Even still, he liked making the speech. “The play’s the thing.” He mumbled to himself as he stared blankly at one of the institutional white walls of his windowless office.