Stories and Conventions

I read this interesting article (suprisingly) at Malcolm Gladwell's website. I was expecting some fluff, like how eating Kraft Easy Mac three times a week leads to an increase in left-handedness and then absolutely nothing about why this matters, but instead was treated to a book review of "Why?", by Charles Tilly, which I fully intend to order off of Amazon but most likely will never get around to doing it.

Anyway, interesting excerpt-

Some social situations don't lend themselves to the easy reconciliation of reason and role. In Jonathan Franzen's novel "The Corrections," for example, one of the characters, Gary, is in the midst of a frosty conversation with his wife, Caroline. Gary had the sense, Franzen writes, "that Caroline was on the verge of accusing him of being 'depressed,' and he was afraid that if the idea that he was depressed gained currency, he would forfeit his right to his opinions. . . . Every word he spoke would become a symptom of disease; he would never again win an argument." Gary was afraid, in other words, that a technical account of his behavior—the explanation that he was clinically depressed—would trump his efforts to use the stories and conventions that permitted him to be human. But what was his wife to do? She wanted him to change.

Why this excerpt? It reminds of a recent frosty conversation between a somewhat inebriated Redness and his wife. I'd explain, but everyone who reads this was there and should see the parallels...