Happy by Derren Brown EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Derren Brown
- ISBN: 0593076192
- Language: English
- Genre: Conscious, and Thought
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 5 MB
- Page: 451
- Price: Free
Beginnings
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Once Upon a Time
A WHILE AGO, my long-term friend and collaborator Andy Nyman told me the following story.
Andy an actor with a strong fan base, had emerged from the stage door after a show to find
waiting for him a lost-looking, nervous young girl, perhaps fourteen years old, barely able to make
eye contact. Her mother, who was clutching a small camera, stood next to her. The mother asked if
her daughter might get a photograph with him. He happily agreed, and the girl wordlessly stepped
forward and wrapped an arm tightly around his torso. He could feel her trembling at his side as they
posed. He grinned dutifully, and as the mother took the picture, Andy sensed that the girl had
neither smiled nor properly faced the camera. He asked to look at the picture on the camera’s
viewing screen, and there he was, looking the picture of happiness, while the poor soul next to him
had indeed been caught with her eyes half shut and expression indistinct.
‘Do you want to do that again? You weren’t smiling,’ he asked the girl.
The mother answered for her: ‘Oh, she always looks terrible in pictures.’
My friend was taken aback by her words. ‘Don’t say that!’ he protested, in defence of the
daughter.
The girl spoke up for the first time: ‘Oh, it’s okay, it’s true.’
In that brief exchange over a photograph, there also appeared to be a snapshot of a life: one of
wretched self-esteem for the girl, and its apparent maternal origins. Instead of helping to encourage
and nurture her child at all times as we would hope, the mother, it would certainly seem, is instead
helping to perpetuate a crippling lack of self-belief. The damning word in the mother’s remark is
‘always’, because ‘always’ tells us there is a pattern, a story at work. And stories affect us deeply.
When I perform my day job as a kind of magician, I work with people’s capacity to fool
themselves with stories. A good magic trick forces the spectator to tell a story that arrives at an
impossible conclusion, and the clearer the story is, the better. Normally, everything you need to
solve the puzzle happens right in front of you, but you are made to care only about the parts that the
magician wants you to. When you join up those dots, so misleadingly and provocatively arranged,
you are left with a baffling mystery. A good magician might make the trick mean more, by elevating
it beyond the mere disappearance or transposition of some props. If it can be made to feel somehow
relevant to you, rather than a mere display of skill, then the story is likely to have more import and
the trick more impact.
If magic exploits our capacity to continuously, unconsciously modify events in the ongoing world
to form a story, even at the expense of everything we know to be possible in the universe, then we
are indeed master editors, tirelessly working to communicate to others and ourselves a meaningful
tale.
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