The Stories That Won't Stay Whole

We keep looking for the thread that runs all the way back.

Scholars are hunting humanity’s oldest stories—Proto-Indo-European myths, narrative DNA that might connect us across millennia. The work is meticulous, the ambition understandable. But the field is getting more honest about what’s actually there: not coherent origin tales, just fragments that won’t assemble into the clean lineage we crave. The record is mostly silence, with our projections filling the gaps.

This week reminded me how much we need certainty about where meaning comes from, and how rarely the archive cooperates. A sheep gets pulled from 30 meters underground in a cave rescue—small miracle, strange persistence. An electronic music pioneer dies; what outlives him are sounds that reshaped how we hear, but the person is gone. The hunt for ancient myths yields critical essays on what we don’t know, can’t prove, and probably invented to soothe ourselves.

We want the line drawn clearly: ancient myth to ritual practice to the values we claim today. The reality is compost and loss. Most of what mattered to our ancestors dissolved. What persists isn’t always what was strongest—sometimes it’s just what got lucky, or adapted fast enough, or found someone to carry it forward.

Coherenceism’s principle of Mature Uncertainty says: hold both. You can know what you know—the stories that reach you, the meanings that land—without pretending the line is unbroken. Confidence in what resonates now, humility about the gaps between here and there. The archive is fragile because transmission is fragile, and that fragility is information, not failure.

What survives erasure carries weight precisely because it survived. What’s lost feeds what grows next—not as retrieval, but as cleared ground where new meaning can root. We don’t get to inherit a complete cosmology. We get fragments, honest uncertainty, and the work of composting both into something coherent enough to act from.

The shift is this: stop demanding that meaning prove its pedigree. Start asking what resonates now, and mark where you’re building on inheritance versus filling gaps with your own voice. The difference matters. One is fidelity, the other is projection pretending to be memory.

The stories that won’t stay whole are teaching us how to hold mystery without collapsing it into false certainty. That’s the alignment work: not pretending the archive is complete, but honoring what’s here and naming the rest as unknown.

Field Notes

• Yet the hunt for the world’s oldest stories is not exactly triumphant (MetaFilter)
• Deep Sheep (MetaFilter)
• David Ball (1959 – 2025), Soft Cell (MetaFilter)