Returning to the Great Stories

This kind of reminded me of Alain de Botton's article where he talks about how religions re-inforce the need to return to the known and delve deeper, while in the rest of our lives, the key word is novelty, and the endless chasing of it.

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"...It didn’t matter that the story had begun, because Kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen.. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t.

In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.
That is their mystery and their magic."

from
'The God of Small Things', Arundhati Roy (excerpt sent by a reader, I had forgotten this)