The Great Mental Models, Volume 4

When an audience must work a little harder to understand a piece of art, it builds engagement. It makes characters more believable—real people rarely say exactly what they mean all the time. It can turn what looks to be a simple tale on the surface, such as George Orwell's Animal Farm, into a profound and moving work with lasting impact.

But setting is not just a one-way street, not just the environment acting upon the characters. Characters also act upon and interact with their setting. They navigate its challenges, exploit its opportunities, and leave their mark on its landscape. Every story is a symbiotic relationship between character and setting, a reciprocal exchange of influence and transformation.

A story set in medieval Europe will have different constraints and opportunities than one set in modern-day Tokyo. A character in a small, gossipy village will face different challenges than one in a large, anonymous city. Setting shapes the choices characters make, the conflicts they face, the resolutions they find.

Aczel quotes Buddhist writer Thich Nhat Hanh, writing, "Emptiness is the Middle Way between existent and nonexistent." Reflecting on this statement, Aczel explains, "I came to believe that I could even read the quoted verses as saying: existence = 1, non-existence = -1, and emptiness = 0. Emptiness was the door from nonexistence to existence, in the same way that zero was the conduit from positive to negative numbers."

Aczel writes that this duality is not universal. He describes the catuskoti, found in early Buddhist logic, that presents four possibilities, instead of two, for any state: that something is, is not, is both, or is neither. It may seem hard to grasp, but actually, our world and words are full of events and expressions that defy binary categorization. A dinner at a fancy restaurant may just be average, which is a way of saying it is neither good nor bad. Your child leaving home may be something you consider both great and devastating.