Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures. (All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.)
In continuation of my previous discussion of what constitutes truth, I offer this:
I normally don’t make assumptions, but I feel pretty comfortable in saying that everyone lies at some point in their lives. But what is the reason we lie? Again, I feel fairly safe thinking that we all have very diverse reasons. Sometimes we are afraid of the consequences of truth, whether self-inflicted or otherwise. However, sometimes it’s just the human laziness factor. Something that took a decade to affect us could be explained in a hypothetical event that would take all of an hour to unfold (or two minutes to explain).
Tim O’Brien, in his book, The Things They Carried, expresses this through a concept of “story” truth versus a concept of “happening” truth. Sometimes the story truth holds a lot more value than the happening truth does. It is better at explaining the feeling of the situation and the effect it has than the actual play-by-play ever could be. This returns us to the concept of what exactly truth is.
If truth cannot be defined as the explicit record of a sequence of events, how then can we define it? Of the 13 results that dictionary.com returned for me, the only one I actually like is “ideal or fundamental reality apart from and transcending perceived experience”. An event we learn from is something that cannot be expressed in a few simple words and because everyone perceives things differently, the material one person gains from an experience is very likely completely different from what someone else would gain from the same experience. To ensure everyone starts on common ground, it is often useful to to adjust one’s version of the event to more general (or specific, depending on the parameters of the situation) terms. For example, certain words have taken on a new connotation for me throughout the course of this year due to the eccentricity of my ENGR 117 professor, and the attitude that is elicited in me from their very utterance passes most people completely by. I’d hedge my bets on the presumption that the sentence, “We were completely gobsmacked by the convoluted idiocy of our prof in thinking that Robolab was robost enough to better facilitate nominal punchulation of the big bug-a-boo (or shinola)” probably does not even make sense to any and/or all of you (or really even those who know what it refers to), but to me it is an extremely vivid reminder of the utter frustration that was my freshman year of college. While you’re undoubtedly still trying to figure out if half of that sentence even consists of real English words, it has the power to induce shuddering almost to the point of all-out seizing in approximately 200 people with the common experience of the First-Year Engineering Honors Program at Purdue University that one fateful year. If that’s not enough for you, try figuring out why that same group of people gets distracted in chemistry class by very fundamental equilibrium equations such as pH = pKa + log[A-]/[HA] . These snippets of seemingly nonsensical rambling can be used within that group of people to discuss the attitudes associated with a plethora of situations not even remotely related to said honors program because of the connotation it has taken on within the local scope.
If I were to walk into a room with a cast on my hand to be asked the question of how I injured it, my response would vary according to a great many factors. If I was trying to cry out for help because I felt threatened at home, I might tell someone that I broke it in a fistfight with my stepfather. Or if I was just overly stressed out and wanted some attention from somebody, I may decide to say that I was mad and hit a wall. If I wanted to portray myself as a jock, I may say I was injured in a game of basketball. Any of these situations are perfectly plausible. Perhaps I really do get into fistfights with my stepfather every night, but I never had the injuries to prove it. Maybe I went home every night and cried and cried because my life sucked and then I’d throw up and hit a wall to release all the pent-up anger, but I never actually broke anything. The implications of the fabricated situation are obviously true, but the situation itself just hasn’t materialized–yet. Self-preservation tells me to do something to prevent the impending situation, so if I have the “proof”, I might as well use it, right? It may as well have been true.
Truth is an amazing concept. The CIA (and the Bible, I suppose) claim that it will set us free. It is more complex that almost any other idea known to man. I just hope I haven’t managed to convince you all that I am a pathological liar.
Hee hee…The convoluted idiot to whom you refer most certainly has warped my sense of meaning for the words you have included. Great sentence by the way:)