The Human Experience

Capturing the human experience through the use of words is the most beautiful and important thing any writer can do. To capture the experience and the emotions themselves lived through life are so much more important than the actual events of life themselves. As Tim O'Brien states in The Things They Carried "Almost everything else in invented" (O'Brien 171). He explains that though the basis for the story is true, the details are not. They, in the end do not matter, that is, except to convey the experience and emotions he went through. The experience is what matters, the details are only there for conveying the experience. "I want you to know what I felt." (O'Brian 171). To convey the emotions of an experience is really the whole point. There is no point in a story if there is no emotion in it. Emotion makes it real. It gives us connection and understanding and empathy for the characters. and its what makes or breaks a story. Knowing what actually happened in say, this case, the war is shadowed by the experience of the soldiers. The people living through it. Joan Didion says the same thing about stories and experience in the writing piece On Keeping a Notebook. The emotion and the experience is the truth, and its truer than the events that took place. "How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook" (Didion 83). A notebook to her is a record of emotions. It is a record of experience and who a person really is. A notebook doesn't care about the events in ones life but rather how one perceives them, how someone feels about it. that is what matters. That is the ultimate truth. Facts can clutter a story but the emotions are the real, raw truth of the world. They are the human experience. 
Memories are what make people who they are. Memories are the pieces of information that make up the whole of the human experience. The act of remembering who who you once were is to understand who you are now. "Why did I write it down?" Didion asks the reader, "in order to remember of course.." (Didion 82). Didion's whole purpose of keeping a notebook is to remember it all. to remember who she was as a person. The drive t remember is the drive to understand. Its why we write it down. When writing is only meant for oneself it is a collection of oneself so the future self can remember. Its so the future self can understand why they do the things they do. To have the stories written down is to have them present, have them there. To have them there is to understand, to make things real, making them easier to deal with. O'Brian tells stories to make them present "I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again." (O'Brian 172). To remember a past self is to understand it. To understand is the ability to deal with and lighten. Without the stories and the ability to bring the past present, there is no capability to loose the grief and the pain. Memories are powerful. without Memories there would be no story to write, and there would be a loss of everything ever experienced. without memories there would be no human experience to share. And human experience is really whats most important.