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In the double-edged sense that the Chinese intend it, “interesting times” aptly applies to this era in our profession. I have very much enjoyed the opportunity to participate in these turbulent goings-on from the catbird seat that the office of Presidency of the Academy provides. No, catbird seat is not quite right. It fails to capture the fleeting amazement of the position. Perhaps it is more like a turn in a queue, stepping up to binoculars fixed on a coverted view of a natural wonder. Well, that's not right either. That metaphor misses the sense of opportunity, real and illusory, to actually do something and make a difference. Is there no metaphor that I can draw on?
Metaphors organize knowledge by taking what we know very well, often something simple and direct, and apply it to something we know less well, perhaps something elusive and difficult. In this talk, I am interested in this metaphor: Life is a story. Life is the telling and performing of stories. We are speaking here about the person as storyteller, a maker of narrative—Homo narrans (after Hadyn White). As Roland Barthes (1977, p. 77) said: “Under [an] infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative…, [N]arrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simple there like life itself.” Life is a story. Metaphors, including this one, may be generative. They generate new knowledge, providing semantic directions leading to new insights. Consider the hydrodynamic energy metaphor that Freud developed with such significant results. Metaphors highlight certain matters, eclipse others, create invisible entailments, and—in so doing—subtly incline our thinking away from other means for gaining knowledge. Hence, the narrative