James' World 2

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In recent years, the word “storytelling” has been thoroughly absorbed by the language of commerce, reshaped into self-aggrandizing doublespeak for “selling.” Which only increases the countervailing need for storytellers in the more artful, ancient, and magical mold of Neil Gaiman, who conjures fictions that stir up our primal fears and darkest desires, our subconscious yearnings and unspoken fantasies. Whether he’s turning death and dream into flesh-and-blood characters, as in his classic comic series, “The Sandman”; populating the modern world with figures from ancient myth in fiction best sellers like “American Gods” and “Anansi Boys”; or conjuring eerie new children’s fairy tales and ghost yarns (“Stardust,” “Coraline”), the British-born author’s genre-jumping writing is a constant reminder that the stories that linger longest, that move us most profoundly, are often the ones that can’t be turned into means but function as ends in themselves. “Myths and stories are how we have made sense of the world for as long as we’ve been wandering the planet,” says Gaiman, 61, who helped oversee Netflix’s long-awaited “The Sandman” series, which premieres on Aug. 5. “And right now, making sense of the world is somewhere between difficult and impossible.”

For the last five or six years, we’ve been living through what feels like almost unfathomable turmoil, and I think a lot of people see this period as an unprecedented chapter in the human story. But when it comes to stories, I basically believe in Ecclesiastes’ “There is nothing new under the sun.” So my question to you is whether you think we are living in a new story — or is it just new to us? This reminds me of something that happened after the Sept. 11 attacks. When we could fly again, I flew to Trieste, Italy, for a conference. I remember going into a display of Robert Capa photographs taken in that area during World War II. Until that moment, I had regarded World War II as being unimaginably distant in time. It was this thing that had happened in history, that had happened to my family — basically all of them were killed; a couple of outliers made it to England — but that was history. That happened then. But there was something very strange about looking at those Robert Capa photos post-9/11 because they made me go, Those people are us. I feel the same way today. History is now. But I’m also getting more obsessive about human beings over huge swaths of time. Part of that came out of being on the Isle of Skye during the serious U.K. lockdown. On Skye, if there’s a rock somewhere, it’s probably because somebody put it there. I realized that the rock that I was using to keep the lid on my dustbin was a stone that had been dragged around. People have been in this place for thousands and thousands of years, and in this bay, I’m living in, they’ve left behind rocks! Realizing that about the rocks makes you take the long view. Which is that the human race is mostly people just trying to live their lives, and that bad [expletive] is going to happen. That then moves you into other territory.

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