People share histories in conversation, their own and those they have come to know, those we create and tell of ourselves and those we pass on, suitably modified. The stories we have come to know in this way, with a strong prejudice in favour of low degrees of separation, form the basis of our generalisations and larger more abstract understanding of human nature, which in turn is the basis of our reception and assumption of new histories. Versions of this structure, often highly sophisticated, that we enjoy encountering in novels, have little impact on our own researches, except perhaps at an abstract methodological level. In attending to another's telling we model not only the instances they are describing but the context from which they present it. This latter may be highly opaque and the opacity more or less accounted for in our responsiveness. Our progress is in things known, but just as much in things known to be unknown. The unknowable can arouse a kind of transgressive enthusiasm, especially on realising that understanding is an optional component of engagement. Limited to understanding it prompts a move to the universal, a weak but somehow socially approved elevation of perspective. The strange thing is that our understanding of ourselves is subject to exactly the same vicissitudes.