Tim O’Brien was recently referenced in the New York Times Book Review with the following moving quote from his novel The Things They Carried:

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest proper models of human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.

Three things came to mind when I read this:

First, that The Things They Carried is one of those books I know I should have read a long time ago, and always felt bad that I hadn’t. It makes me think that I should put together a list of my top ten “always meant to get to but somehow never found the time” novels and start finding that time.

Second, that a part of me was simultaneously glad I hadn’t yet read it, because otherwise I would have had that memorable passage in mind as I wrote the following section from the story of mine I referred to in an earlier entry:

I really should stop trying to make sense of it. After all, part of the truth of zombies (and by zombies I mean more than just the raw reality of each individual one of them, I mean the concept, the very fact that they exist) is that there is no sense to them. No one expects a hurricane to make sense, or an earthquake to have a point. And I’ve learned that about zombies by now, too. But it turns out to be just like the way people look up at the passing clouds and without even trying find a seahorse, a cow, or even Abe Lincoln. I can’t seem to stop. That is what I do. It just happens.

I’m sure I would have internalized O’Brien’s words, and I would have then had to struggle against his influence as I attempted to make my own comments about the efforts we make as humans to impose sense on the senseless.

And finally, while being moved by the quote, I also thought—isn’t that what we as writers do, create order out of chaos? However we try to approach the task, it’s ultimately impossible to be a disinterested reporter on the stuff of life, to just say, “This is what happened.” We mold, we shape, we omit, we reorder, we blend. We, consciously or unconsciously, offer our own perspectives. We aren’t just court stenographers to the universe, and couldn’t be, no matter how hard we tried.

A true war story can be moral, even if the moral ultimately comes down to—War is terrible, people, so could you please just stop?