Round 1

“A boxer, like a writer, must stand alone,” wrote A.J. Liebling, a heavyweight of literary journalism, in The Sweet Science, a collection of his boxing pieces for The New Yorker from the 1950s.

I quote this boast not to claim any macho kinship with boxers, least of all the current heavyweight contenders. Rather, I write to take the title from them and give it to stories. Allow me to step into the ring to make my case.

Round 2

The phrase “the sweet science of boxing” was popularized by Liebling. He got it from Pierce Egan’s Boxiana, collections of articles about boxing in England in the 1700s. Egan called boxing “The Sweet Science of Bruising.”

“Writers have long been attracted to boxing, from the early days of the English prize ring to the present time,” wrote the novelist Joyce Carol Oates in her book On Boxing. “Its most immediate appeal is that of the spectacle, in itself wordless, lacking a language, that requires others to define it, celebrate it, complete it. Like all extreme but perishable human actions boxing excites not only the writer’s imagination, but also his instinct to bear witness. And boxers have frequently displayed themselves, inside the ring and out, as characters in the literary sense of the word. Extravagant fictions without a structure to contain them.”

For Oates and others boxing stands for the world. But what she says about writers and boxers applies to all of us. Oates celebrated Mike Tyson. But Tyson just chewed off a piece of his opponent Evander Holyfield’s ear in a heavyweight title fight. This distasteful act emboldens me to make this challenge.

The sweet science is not boxing, but storytelling.

Round 3

Scientists are realizing now that they are getting a closer look at how the brain works that story seems to be the fundamental unit of mind. Our mind/brain makes sense of the world by creating small stories. It secretes stories like our lungs breathe air and our hearts pump blood. Babies develop grammar and language through stories.

Mark Turner summarizes this new science in his recent book The Literary Mind. Turner suggests that stories have fueled explosive human evolution. Physically we have not changed much in 200,000 years. But look where we’ve gotten, telling stories all the way.

Science is in its infancy. Stories are not.

Round 4

Why read stories? Why tell stories? One might as well ask what makes us human. We are the storytelling primates. We think through story. This is nothing new. In the beginning was the word. We are born to tell stories.

My daughters sit around the kitchen with their toys saying, “Pretend they’re in the jungle,” and “pretend that there’s this big snake,” constructing, inventing elaborate stories out of little pieces of plastic and their minds, their language, their stories. Kids want stories so bad they make them up whenever they can’t get adults to do it for them.

We tell stories about ourselves to each other. We tell stories about each other to ourselves.

Round 5

Some people speak of a storytelling revival. Stories can never die. There cannot be .a culture without stories.

When I traveled through the Amazon years ago, I filled notebooks with the stories I heard from people, who were amazed and delighted that I could fill up pages with their words. The kids yearned so badly to be able to write that their hands held imaginary pencils when they watched me write.

Round 6

Stories help us understand the meaning of what’s happening in the world rather than simply reporting the latest news about what’s happening in the world. To paraphrase Marcel Proust and William Carlos Williams, when I’m drowning in a sea of data, story is the rope that saves me from the din of fractured thought.

Round 7

We need new stories. But we often don’t get them until our lives change. Although sometimes, like the Washoe Indians who dreamed of a return to their homeland at Lake Tahoe and are now seeing it happen, a new story becomes real. I think stories don’t usually change until lives change. But I know the opposite is also true. Stories can change lives. It’s a dialectic. And in a dialectic we yearn for synthesis.

Round 8

When stories fail to work they can be changed, just as we can change our minds. Perhaps even literally our own neural networks, the connections in our brains are shaped and can be changed by stories.

Round 9

“We live in a sea of stories,” Max Frankel wrote recently in The New York Times Magazine. So we have to learn to swim, “to construct stories, understand stories, see through stories and use stories to find out how things work or what they come to.

“Journalists, like teachers, are society’s narrators,” says Frankel. “The good ones discern our fears, anxieties and curiosities and tell stories that make life meaningful and manageable.”

Doing journalism, to paraphrase anthropologist Renato Rosaldo, involves telling stories about the stories people tell about themselves. We need better and more understandable science through better stories, verified facts, ground that you can actually step on, good old reproducible, testable knowledge. It galvanizes the story.

Round 10

Our minds and therefore our world is made of story. Science can’t escape this now. Science is knowledge. What is science but a story made of everything, said Mary Shelley. So the story of science must be told.

Weaving story is an art and a science—or a sweet science. A story is like a hypothesis. It has to be tested against reality.

The Sweet Science of Stories marries this incongruous tension, between science and art, which is akin to how the sweet science of boxing marries sport and savagery.

Living things and stories go together naturally, like science and story go together. Sweetly, but not often enough.

Round 11

Stories, like boxing fights, take many shapes. Stories take many forms, like life itself. In the real world, of course, there are often messy endings. Or no endings at all. But like a fight, stories must end. Reader’s naturally want a resolution.

Round 12

I discussed the sweet science of stories with a scientist and an English professor recently.

The scientist said stories are fluff. The English professor said science is just another story.

Both meant to be dismissive of stories in one way or another.

But what do they know?

I knocked out both of them.

And if Evander Holyfield will give me 12 rounds with the title of The Sweet Science at stake, at least I’ll promise not to chew his ear off.