The Universal Is a Binding Agent, and a Saving Grace

not a technique, not a plan, but a discovery that un-strangers strangers

Photograph taken by Beth Kephart, at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater.

NOTE: Between now and October 15, 2025, new annual paid subscribers living in the United States will receive original signed art, up to 6” x 9,” mailed in a sturdy cardboard envelope. Those stateside readers renewing their annual paid subscriptions during this time period will receive the same. I’m custom making the art, specific to each person. PLEASE do DM me your mailing address.

*

What makes a true story transcend its own plot points? What makes it universal?

This is, it has always been, the question. The question I’ve wrestled with in classrooms on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, in a big room on an old farm, in a cottage by the sea, in a hotel by a river, in the pocket of Zoom rooms. The question that has prompted countless marginal notes in the manuscripts of those who have shared their pages with me. The question I have worked through in my own writing of hundreds of essays and too many books—testing my own theories, arriving at new thoughts, trying again and differently.

(I cannot seem to teach that which I have not, in very particular and personal ways, learned from my own pages—pages both ruined and resolved.)

The work (though work is the wrong word, for I find the deepest pleasure in it) is never done. There is no one answer, no inarguable fix, no five-step solution, no manifesto. Universality is a quest, not a checklist. It is that arrow of light, that quiet stitch, that sometimes nearly invisible bridge that makes of one person’s story an every-person story.

(Said another way: The universal is not my story matters most, so look look look at me. Rather, the universal is take another look at us and our shared and wondrous and most bewildering world.)

Universal stories yield purpose, not strut. Evocation, not declaration, Suggestion, not proclamation. Wisdom, not whine (never whine).

And so I search, still, for the universal in books I read. I search for examples to uphold and share. Some examples startle with the force of the new. Some appease, incite a common nod. All of them bind us, ultimately, in our shared humanity.

Because that, in the end, is the point: The universal is a binding agent. We discover, through it, our common ground.

In Vincent Van Gogh’s letters to his brother, Theo, countless universalisms transcend: “Yet you have to make a start, no matter how incompetent you feel in the face of inexpressible perfection, of the overwhelming beauty of nature.”

In Virginia Woolf’s diaries, written to and for herself, we find her looking right at us:

What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment. (August 21, 1927)

In the newest memoir by my dear friend Judy Goldman (The Rest of Our Lives)—Judy, who rocks pink sweatshirts and yellow sneakers as she shares her words with huge, adoring crowds—we discover the universally gentle, and the gently true: “We have to learn, over and over, that something which was just here can be, all of a sudden, gone.”

Finally, in Sidewalks, Valeria Luiselli forces a wise and surprising double take with an image we might not have summoned for ourselves, despite the fact that it is, for you and also for me, undeniably true.

Searching for a grave is, to some extent, like arranging to meet a stranger in a café, the lobby of a hotel, or a public squire, in that both activities engender the same way of being there and looking: at a given distance, every person could be the one waiting for us; every grave, the one we are searching for. Finding either involves circulating among people or tombs; approaching and scrutinizing their respective features.

We seek the universal in texts, on canvases, on the stage, in conversations with our neighbors. We seek, and then we seek again, for the universal is as political, and as civic, as almost anything else. The universal isn’t, I am suggesting, merely an artistic choice, an artistic strategy. I think it might just be our saving grace.