Christopher Morley on Truth

Collecting the short stories in the anthology Nothing But the Truth got us to thinking about the topic,  and this short essay from Christopher's Morley's "Mince Pie" (1918) is a real gem:


"Our mind is dreadfully active sometimes, and the other day we began to speculate on Truth.

Our friends are still avoiding us.

Every man knows what Truth is, but it is impossible to utter it. The face of your listener, his eyes mirthful or sorry, his eager expectance or his churlish disdain insensibly distort your message. You find yourself saying what you know he expects you to say, or (more often) what he expects you not to say. You may not be aware of this, but that is what happens. In order that the world may go on and human beings thrive, nature has contrived that the Truth may not often be uttered.

And how is one to know what is Truth? He thinks one thing before lunch; after a stirring bout with corned beef and onions the shining vision is strangely altered. Which is Truth?

Truth can only be attained by those whose systems are untainted by secret influences, such as love, envy, ambition, food, college education and moonlight in spring.

If a man lived in a desert for six months without food, drink or companionship he would be reasonably free from prejudice and would be in a condition to enunciate great truths.

But even then his vision of reality would have been warped by so much sand and so many sunsets.

Even if he survived and brought us his Truth with all the gravity and long night-gown of a Hindu faker, as soon as any one listened to him his message would no longer be Truth. The complexion of his audience, the very shape of their noses, would subtly undermine his magnificent aloofness.

Women have learned the secret. Truth must never be uttered, and never be listened to.

Truth is the ricochet of a prejudice bouncing off a fact.

Truth is what every man sees lurking at the bottom of his own soul, like the oyster shell housewives put in the kitchen kettle to collect the lime from the water. By and by each man's iridescent oyster shell of Truth becomes coated with the lime of prejudice and hearsay.

All the above is probably untrue."

Aldous Huxley -- Part I

I have been reading and re-reading Aldous Huxley this past month or so, and so much of what he wrote has bearing on truth -- and lies.  More to come, but here are some samples:

"An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie."
Aldous Huxley

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored."
Aldous Huxley

"Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations."
Aldous Huxley

"Man approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors."
Aldous Huxley

"Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know."
Aldous Huxley

"Proverbs are always platitudes until you have personally experienced the truth of them."
Aldous Huxley

"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad."
Aldous Huxley

Voters think even our first president lied - latimes.com

Voters think even our first president lied - latimes.com

" . . .maybe recent data just show that today's disgust with Washington (the town, not the man) is starting to affect the reputation of earlier giants. Either way, a new CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll found that 74% of voters think the father of our country lied while in office."

 As I have been editing these anthologies it has reinforced a belief that the stories we tell -- to ourselves, to each other, to school children -- are as much about the world as we want it to be as they are about the world as it is. The story about George Washington and the cherry tree ("I cannot tell a lie, father -- I cut it down with my little hatchet") was invented by Parson (Mason Locke) Weems out of whole cloth but it illustrated something that we wanted and that we needed to believe: that our founders, that our leaders were incorruptible. So what does it mean when we no longer believe that story?

Perhaps it signifies that we no longer believe honesty is important, or that it is unattainable. Perhaps it means that we believe that power inevitably corrupts and we are naive to think otherwise. It could also be that we want to have leaders with feet of clay to justify our own shortcomings: even Honest Abe told a whopper on occasion, right? The key is that this poll doesn't reflect a change in attitudes towards Washington and Lincoln: it represents a change in our attitudes about truth.

Capital Ideas; Denis Diderot

I did not include a piece by the 18th Century French encyclopedist, Denis Diderot, in Capital Ideas: 150 Classic Writings About the Death Penalty from the Code of Hammurabi to Clarence Darrow. I wish I had. He wrote a short piece, "On the Inconsistency of Public Opinion," about the tribulations of Chevalier Desroches, who was made a pariah by the public for his blatant infidelity to his wife. It would serve Tiger Wood  -- and the journalists reporting on his current tribulations -- well to read it.

In the telling of the life story of Desroches, Diderot recounts this incident about an impending execution:

Desroches becomes a conseiller in Parlement as a very young man; fortune favors him, and he is soon admitted to the Grand' Chambre, his turn comes round as a judge-advocate in the criminal court, and on the strength of a judgment of his a wrongdoer is sentenced to the extreme penalty. It is a custom that on the day of execution those who pronounced the sentence should be present in the Hotel de Vile to receive the victim's last requests -- should he make any, as was the case here. It was winter, Desroches and his colleague were sitting by the fire when word came that the victim had arrived. He was brought in on a mattress, his body mangled by torture, but he managed to raise himself as he entered and, with eyes toward heaven, explained, "Almighty God, your judgments are just!" There he was, on his mattress, right at Desroches' feet. "So, Monsieur," he cried to Desroches in a loud voice, "You condemned me, and I am guilty of the crime I am accused of; yes, I confess it. All the same you know nothing, nothing at all . . ." And he went over the whole legal process step by step, showing, clear as daylight, that there had been no substance in the proofs and no justice in the sentence. Desroches, seized with a mortal trembling, gets to his feet, tears off his magistrate's robes, and renounces forever the perilous profession of pronouncing upon men's lives. And this is the man they call mad! A man with self-knowledge, a man afraid to defile the garb of cleric by loose morals or to find himself, one day, stained with an innocent man's blood. -- The truth is we didn't know all this. -- The truth is, if one doesn't know things, one should hold one's tongue. --

. . . Meanwhile, Desroches was in need of a career. So he bought a regiment. That is to say, he exchanged the profession of condemning his fellow men to death for the simpler one of just killing them.

This short extract is from This is Not a Story and Other Stories, translated by P.N. Furbank (Oxford University Press, 1991.) An excellent, surprising modern little book!

Books About Greed

This week's New Yorker had a review of a pair of new novels about greed and the reviewer, James Wood, reminded me of the introduction to George Orwell's "Keep the Aspidistra Flying." After I had read and pondered the 56 stories about greed included my The Love Of Money anthology, I concluded that the opposite of greed was not generosity, but rather love. I think Orwell might have agreed:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not  money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And  though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries,  and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not money, it profiteth me nothing. Money suffereth long, and is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily  provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. . . . And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money.

I Corinthians xiii (adapted)

Odd, isn't it, how once you start thinking deeply about a topic -- as I did when I was editing The Love of Money: 56 Classic Stories About Greed -- how that subject pops up everywhere.

Just finished reading Elizabeth Ironside's A Very Private Enterprise, an excellent mystery set in India. On page 57 a character had this to say:

"Extreme wealth and poverty undoubtedly increase the temptation to steal, but I think we must agree that the impulse of greed lies deep within man's nature. Indeed, perhaps we can say that social controls on greed are stronger in a society like India where the hierarchy of wealth and position is felt to have a religious and moral basis than in a more egalitarian society where even quite slight differences in wealth can create envy, because no particular right is felt to attach to its owners."

Featured in the Portland Writing Examiner

Nothing But the Truth -- our newest anthology of 49 classic short stories about truth and lies -- is a featured book in the Portland, OR Writing Examiner today. Whoo-hoo!

NYT: The True Answer and the Right Answer

Stanley Fish, in his  January 11 Opinionator column in the New York Times, wrote that in matters both trivial and grave, "true" and "right" aren't necessarily the same thing. Great article: it introduced me to a category of not-truth that I hadn't considered before.

In Nothing But the Truth: 49 Classic Stories About Truth and Lies we explore these awkward  encounters, but none of the stories address this specific phenomenon: the bureaucratic "right" answer that has no relation to objective truth.

Perhaps the closest appears in the story of the Salem Witch trials, retold by Elizabeth Gaskell in her novella "Lois the Witch," which is included in End of the Line: five short Novels About the Death Penalty. In witch trials, those who confessed to witchcraft were sometimes spared although they were not witches; those, like Lois, who insisted on their true innocence were hanged.