Unlike modernity, with its narratives of the future and progress ��� its longing for another form of life ��� late modernity does not have a revolutionary pathos of the new or of fresh beginnings. It lacks the spirit of departure. It is therefore declining into a mode of ���on and on���, of absent alternatives. It loses narrative courage, the courage to create a world-changing narrative. Storytelling is now mainly a matter of commercialism and consumption. As storyselling, it does not contain the power to bring about social change. This exhausted late modernity does not know the ���sense of beginning���, the passion of ���beginning from the start���. We no longer commit ourselves to anything. We constantly take the trouble to do something. We succumb to convenience or to likes, which need no narrative. Late modernity knows no longing, no vision, no distance. It therefore lacks aura, that is, lacks a future.

[...] Hannah Arendt prefaces the chapter on action in The Human Condition with an unusual line from Isak Dinesen: ���All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.���3 Narrative phantasy is healing. By placing our sorrows under the narrative light, it takes away their oppressive facticity. They are absorbed by narrative rhythms and melodies. A story raises them above mere facticity. Instead of solidifying into a mental block, they liquefy in the narrative flow.

Byung-Chul Han, The Crisis of Narrative