“You’ll find the truth in your looking glass, not on the tongues of men.” Excerpt from A Feast for Crows by George R.R.Martin
Truth! Truth? My Truth. Your Truth. Our Truth. Their Truth. My life has been dedicated to knowing the truth, hiding from the truth, running from the truth, liking your truth until I don’t, and on and on and on. I learned a long time ago that the house of Truth is built with no windows but many doors. You look at the house of Truth from its “curb appeal” as one house but each door you enter leads to a different view of that one Truth. No insight into which door opened would be the Truth for you. No light on that therefore no window is needed in Truth’s house.
The late essayist and novelist, Susan Sontag, wrote in her 1963 novel The Benefactor the following; “The truth is always something that is told, not something that is known. If there were no speaking or writing there would be no truth about anything. There would be only what is.”
I find this journey for me is searching for “what is”…is. Helen Keller gives me a clue on how to begin this journey when she wrote, “What I’m looking for is not out there, it is in me.”
A long time ago I decided that reading stories, novels, literature would help me find and know my truth! Salmon Rushdie in an article published in the New Yorker, May 31st 2018, aptly titled, Truth Lies, and Literature attempts to show me the futility of my chosen door to the Truth.
“The truth is that truth has always been a contested idea.” Mr Rushdie continues,”I have argued for much of my life as a writer, that the breakdown in the old agreements about reality is now the most significant reality, and the world can perhaps best be explained in terms of conflicting and often incompatible narratives.”
Hmm does this house of Truth of Mr. Rushdie’s shed some light? Is there a window here? No, it is just the clicker/flicker from the TV while I switch from CNN to Fox News about the same “Story”. Or better still the TV flicker as I try to listen to Mayor Guiliani explain the Truth as I need to know it!
This house of Truth is so conflicted! I come back to Helen Keller and I shut the TV off. I read and I find words written, a long time ago, by a Eugene Ferson in Science of Being. “A word should be a creation, should be a law.”
” How have we human beings used the word? As so many dead leaves as so much worthless sound as of no value. And this is a great loss for us because we are squandering one of the greates powers of the Universe, the power of Truth. Therefore to live Truth is always to mean what we say.”
Now that is a house of Truth that only has one door and many windows. My journey needs “Google Maps” to find it’s address but rest assured I try and I try!
Thank you for reading.
Mark