But there are cases where the passage of time allows other directions to emerge in my belated reading review process. What I'm discovering about Arendt's book is that certain passages have remained with me since I finished reading, popping up from time to time to help me better understand a given interaction or situation. It may be that the best way to review a reading experience is to write about how I changed after finishing the work. A good example came up this week when I saw a news story that reminded me of a comment from Thinking Without a Bannister. Arendt describes a story about a farmer from World War II era Russia who hid starving refugees in a space beneath his barn. This farmer liked to talk about his experience, describing the way they would eat anything, but Arendt makes her verdict clear to the reader - in her mind, the farmer's story was a stupid story because it was merely describing the behavior of starving people, and the fact of placing them in a particular time and space did nothing to change the underlying fact that this story revealed nothing about the world.
The news story that reminded me of the above example described a lost hiker who ignored phone calls from a search and rescue team (here's a link to The Guardian's brief article about the ordeal). It's probably the headline that caused it to spread across the internet - the lost hiker ignored calls because he didn't recognize the number! Oh, us damn millennials, at it again with our misguided ways! The problem should be apparent to anyone who pauses for a moment to think - how lost can someone be if they are still getting cell service? I could go on, detailing more discoveries made after I clicked into this stupid story, but I think my point is already clear - this so-called story is like so many others, stupid at the core in the sense of Arendt's comment, since it's doing nothing more than describing what a certain type of person does all the time. In other words, when you describe what someone does all the time, you aren't telling a story.
I'm temped here to suggest that the fact this became an international story speaks to some larger issue, the deterioration of both mind and soul perhaps reflected in the way we collectively allow what Arendt calls stupid stories to pass for urgent information. However, I think this would be mistaken - for Arendt, it came naturally to stop and think each time she encountered new information, but the rest of us are not up to that standard. What we do instead is rely on personal experience to highlight relevance, whether that be in the news, in life, or even in the struggle to write a reading review, and we do this with the hope that no one exposes the truth - our fascinating lifetimes of small revelations and sudden discoveries are nothing more than a string of non-sequiturs, little flashes of insight when someone with a brain shines a light into the dark corners of our minds, illuminating the things we would have known all along, had we just stopped for a moment to think for ourselves.
