only this time, what a time it is
Saturday, July 7th, 2012 12:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
erikaReality makes me very sad.
I have bought many books, mostly fiction, although the one non-fiction is written by the Dalai Lama, who is so compassionate it's practically fictional anyway.
Hopefully all the books I am going to read will be overachievers in their recreations, a fortress of versimilitude, saving all of the pretty lies for a happy ending. I do find that the happy endings are where I find it most difficult to suspend my disbelief.
But this makes me wonder:
Is it better to tell the truth the whole way through, and rely on a hard right turn, a 90° angle to confound one's readers, surprise them with a pretense & hope that the shock insulates them from the falsehood?
Or should one carefully construct distortions, deceits, fables, fallacies, mendacity—tell many lies, so many one could not believe veracity if it were standing in front of me, looking like my best friend, begging me to listen, crying, pleading?
In retrospect it seems that if you are going to need to lie, you should do so either as little or as often as possible. I used to say that at the very least, I had not succeeded in lying to myself, but I no longer know that that is true.
I used to be able to divide things very easily into lies and truth, white and black, heads or tails, right or wrong, according to my moral code or even someone else's—— but I look back at a picture of myself, at 16 or 17, staring at a picture of myself as a small child— and I cannot say whether I am lying or whether I am telling the truth when myself at 16 says she/you/I deserved this.
I know that the 16 year old believed it (I think) and the 4 year old me didn't believe it (I think), but I don't know whether me, as I am now, believes it. Where is the truth? I have constructed on a foundation of hope, and it seems that I am forever stuck in a moment of realizing that hope is either an illusion, the cruellest thing in the entire world—or it is the strongest, safest, best foundational material that has ever been created.
I have bought many books, mostly fiction, although the one non-fiction is written by the Dalai Lama, who is so compassionate it's practically fictional anyway.
Hopefully all the books I am going to read will be overachievers in their recreations, a fortress of versimilitude, saving all of the pretty lies for a happy ending. I do find that the happy endings are where I find it most difficult to suspend my disbelief.
But this makes me wonder:
Is it better to tell the truth the whole way through, and rely on a hard right turn, a 90° angle to confound one's readers, surprise them with a pretense & hope that the shock insulates them from the falsehood?
Or should one carefully construct distortions, deceits, fables, fallacies, mendacity—tell many lies, so many one could not believe veracity if it were standing in front of me, looking like my best friend, begging me to listen, crying, pleading?
In retrospect it seems that if you are going to need to lie, you should do so either as little or as often as possible. I used to say that at the very least, I had not succeeded in lying to myself, but I no longer know that that is true.
I used to be able to divide things very easily into lies and truth, white and black, heads or tails, right or wrong, according to my moral code or even someone else's—— but I look back at a picture of myself, at 16 or 17, staring at a picture of myself as a small child— and I cannot say whether I am lying or whether I am telling the truth when myself at 16 says she/you/I deserved this.
I know that the 16 year old believed it (I think) and the 4 year old me didn't believe it (I think), but I don't know whether me, as I am now, believes it. Where is the truth? I have constructed on a foundation of hope, and it seems that I am forever stuck in a moment of realizing that hope is either an illusion, the cruellest thing in the entire world—or it is the strongest, safest, best foundational material that has ever been created.
(only you and me
what a you it is)
what a you it is)
