Neuroscience tells us that we do not live in the moment; rather, our awareness of the "now" is delayed in order to integrate the nerve inputs from the most distant parts of our bodies. (Pain signals, for example, travel at 0.61m/s, meaning that seconds will pass after you've stubbed your toe before you become aware of it). The brain is a sovereign imprisoned in the cranium, hearing reports from distant borders of the empire as news even if the events are already history. We are children sitting in the last row of rear-facing seats in a station wagon traveling down time's highway, greedily drinking in the scenery only as it recedes into the past.

Not only is the future unknowable, so is the present. We muddle along, doing the best we can to react to the barrage of live-delayed choices, indistinguishable from chance.

Even our knowledge of the past is unreliable. We spend our entire lives telling and retelling stories about ourselves—and call the results memory. We draft and redraft our personal histories, magnify our kindnesses, minimize our cruelties, rationalize our moments of cowardice, emphasize our flashes of heroism, translate fortune into destiny, assign causes and effects to the macro-scale manifestations of quantum randomness. We can't help imposing the shape of a plot to the chronicle of accidental events that make up our lives.

This is how we make living in this unfeeling, accidental universe tolerable.

That we call such a tendency "the narrative fallacy" doesn't mean it doesn't also touch upon some aspect of the truth. We're not islands scattered in a melancholy-dark sea, but fellow travelers into terra incognita with a shared story. We are the stars in each other's life-plays, the fixed points of light by which we navigate the stage, our gazes yearning for that miraculous connection, that spark that illuminates the dazzling web that weaves us into one constellation called Humanity.