Language Evolved

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"Language is what human beings have evolved, over millions of years for conveying meaning."

- Joseph Gold. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 68

Kindness is Wiser

"Sometimes kindness is wiser than truth."

- Lieutenant Columbo

"I don't know why I always remembered that line."

- Laws of Motion DVD

I know why,

because stories are powerful,

because a line in fiction can speak volumes,

because collecting quotations is awesome,

because it says a lot about how we should act and live,

because,

just because.

The Truth is Hidden Within Us

"Maybe there is a universal truth embedded in everyone's soul.

Maybe we all have the same story hiding inside
like a shared constant in our DNA.

Maybe this collective truth is responsible for the similarity in all our stories.

Truth has a power
and if we all gravitate towards similar ideas,
maybe we do so because those ideas are true,
written deep within is
and when we hear the truth,
even if we don't understand it,
we fell that truth resonate within us,
vibrating with our unconscious wisdom.

Perhaps the truth is not learned by us,
but rather

REcalled

REmembered

REcognized

as that which is already inside us."

- transcribed from the audio book presentation of "The Lost Symbol" by Dan Brown

What Makes Sense is Constantly Changing

"I guess what I mean is maybe only parts of our lives make sense—and only for a moment—and when that moment changes, we change, and when we change that part that made sense goes out of focus and is replaced by another part that makes sense and so on and so on.  Only sometimes what makes sense to us at a particular moment can end up changing our lives forever because it leads us to do things we wouldn’t even conceive of doing during other moments."

- Gordon J.H. Leenders. May Not Appear Exactly As Shown. pg 195

Writing Expresses the Truth

"The unspoken contract that exists between the writer and reader—your promise to express the truth of how people act and talk through the medium of a made-up story."

- Stephen King. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Scribiner: New York, 2000. pg 186

Fiction holds truth. I don't think many people actually think about that. Writers try to express a truth with their writing and good writing usually has a lot to offer.

Find the Truth

"The job of fiction is to find the truth inside the story’s web of lies. . ."

- Stephen King. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. Scribiner: New York, 2000. pg 159

Life is Filled With Secrets

"Life is filled with secrets. You can’t learn them all at once."

- Dan Brown. The DaVinci Code. DoubleDay: New York, 2003. pg 101

Truth Means Responsibility.

Arnie: "What are you trying to do here Ella?"

Ella: "I'm doing my job."

Arnie: "Do you have any idea the sh*t storm you've gotten me in to?"

Ella: "We're just trying to get to the truth."

Arnie: "I get it. But what you need to remember is there's what people wanna hear, what people wanna believe, there's everything else, then there's the truth."

Ella: "And since when is that okay? I can't even believe you're saying this to me. The truth means responsibility Arnie."

Arnie: "Exactly! That's why everyone dreads it."

You Can't Tune it Out

Dr. Tom: "Infidelity, where does it begin?"

Author: "Interesting, tell us more."

"There is a woman, not my partner, and, to be honest, I find this woman to be infuriating - rash, she's headstrong. But, I don't know, deep inside she's like this melody that keeps playing back in my mind.

Erica: "You can tune out a melody."

Dr. Tom: "Oh, I've tried that. It's not so easily done. Ear-worms, I think you call them. You know those songs you get in you head and you just can't get rid of them."

Author: "Oh my goodness that happens to me all the time.

Erica: "You can distract yourself. You can turn the music up really loud, do everything it takes to avoid seeing... to avoid seeing what's right in front of you. Like with Leo"

Author: "Who's Leo?"

Erica: "My brother. He betrayed me and I didn't want to see it."

Dr. Tom: "He was a great brother, but he also had serious flaws... It's so much easier to live in denial and we do it to protect ourselves from the things that we don't want to acknowledge."

Erica: "But if we do that, then we're just living a lie. No matter what we tell ourselves."

Dr. Tom: "'The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.' - Winston Churchill"

- Being Erica Season 2 Episode 9 A River Runs Through It...It Being Egypt

Truth has a Distinct Cost

"There are moments in life so archetypally perfect, that there's only one right thing to say. But as humans, each with our own idiosyncrasies, we may not always respond the way the universe or say, our parents want or expect us to. It is at moments such as these that we realize that the truth has a distinct cost that can't be bargained down. And in these moments, we must choose whether to pay the price."

- Narrator on Everwood

Science Misses

“Science can never speak of the sanctity of life.”
- Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Shalom in the Home author on Word this Week 4 Nov 2007

This is why I believe to get a true picture of our reality we need to look further than science. We need to explore good literature and works of art. And we also need to pay attention to the world religions. Each of these things hold truths if we listen.

Recycled Bits & Pieces

“Imagination can’t create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions.
. . . So, when we think we’re escaping the unbearable ordinariness, and well, untruthfulness of our lives, it’s really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable.”
- Angels in America DVD, HBO Home Box Office, 2004. approximately 37 minutes in.

Enthusiasm

“Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it.”
Bulwer-Lytton., The Last Days of Pompeii

Don’t Want to Know the Truth

“It’s much easier to lie to humans and trick them than to tell the truth. They’d much rather be bamboozled than be told the truth, because the way to trick them is to flatter them and tell them what they want to hear, to reinforce their existing illusions. They don’t want to know the truth. Truth is a bring-down, a bummer, or it’s just too complicated, too much mental work to grasp.”
- Crumb, R. & Peter Poplaski. The R. Crumb Handbook. MQ Publications Ltd: London, 2005 pg 297

Our Perception is Flawed

Errol Morris is interviewed by David Samuels in May 2008’s Wired Magazine.

The article is completely in prose except for one Question & Answer segment. I was always told that this was a lazy way to write when I tried to do the same thing in the university paper. When the editor told me to do a rewrite, I took his editors advice and wrote the entire article in prose.

Oh well, here’s the quote. It’s worthy of my collection, if not for the quality of the writing.

“His point is that we live in a solid world, but our perception of its flawed and partial:

Q: But don’t you think that we manage to keep up a coherent narrative of who we are and where we’ve been?

A: No! We remember things selectively. We experience things selectively. We live in a kind of incomplete, patchwork-quilt universe. A bric-a-brac. Assembled in some higgledy-piggledy way.”

I like how this quote backs up my theory that we actually edit our lives through our use of what we choose and choose not to remember. It’s also interesting that he admits that we don’t have the whole picture. We can’t possibly know the entire story. We live in a limited point of view story but our stories can connect to other stories and create a quilt.

I don’t think the universe is incomplete or put together is a haphazardly way. I don’t think Morris believes this either. He is merely talking about our experience of the world.

I think that Story can explain why we don’t know everything and cannot come to the ultimate truth of the universe. Of course, characters in a story never know everything. They seldom every realize that they are a character in a story. I can’t really think of an example where a character realized this but I am sure there are stories that can be interpreted as such out there.

I think Morris is right and our perception of reality is flawed. But that is only because we don’t perceive the nature of reality to be Story. If we did, we would have a new perception in which to see the world. And upon seeing it with these new eyes, perhaps we can come to some important truths. It makes sense to me.

Deal with the Anger

“Unacknowledged anger does not disappear just because it is denied. The body knows what the mind refuses to admit.”
- Gold, Joseph. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 238

This doesn’t sound like a motivational quotation at first glance but I think it gives us a truth that we need to understand. Anger is a feeling that everyone experiences at some times. It is okay to be angry. It is okay to release the anger as well, in fact it is necessary to do so.

Anger can be released in all sorts of productive and safe ways. You can get a punching bag to release your frustrations. You could go for a run like I do. Or write, paint, make art, whatever. Express yourself and release your anger because holding onto it does not help your health.

Layers of Truth

“I often think of truth like the skin of an onion – you peel it back and what do you find? Another skin. And beneath that, another and another. Truth always has behind it, a more fundamental truth.”
- Crumb, R. & Peter Poplaski. The R. Crumb Handbook. MQ Publications Ltd: London, 2005 pg 234. As written by Harvey Kurtzman as an into to a Crumb collection in 1976.

In the last thirty years this metaphor has become cliché but that doesn’t make it any less powerful.

It's Become a Discipline

“On the one hand, reading literature . . . has become a “discipline,” . . .

On the other hand, . . . it is thought to be a frivolous entertainment not much connected to “real life.”

- Gold, Joseph. Read For Your Life: Literature as a Life Support System. Fitzhenry and Whiteside: Markham, 1990. pg 5

Literature is connected to real life. It is not frivolous and it is not regulated to scholars. Story is something that everyone understands. I believe that story is, in fact, the nature of reality. I am in the process of collecting my thoughts and other people’s thoughts on this subject. It is a fascinating topic and there are literally hundreds of quotations on this subject that I have already collected.

The book from which I took this quotation discusses how we can use literature as a coping mechanism in our daily lives. The doctor who wrote it uses literature in his therapy. I think this is a great idea. Stories have been used to educate since the beginning of time. Stories help us to understand all sort of universal truths.

Challenge the "Truth"

Anything Goes Thursdays # 4

“No Authority can impose a “truth” on you in a dogmatic way – and if some authority tries to, you can challenge that truth in a powerful way, by asking what ideology it is based on.” - Stephen Bonnycastle. In Search of Authority pg 9

The Truth isn't Available

“Unfortunately ‘the truth’ simply isn’t available. If you are going to live intelligently in the modern world, you have to recognize that there are conflicting ideologies, and that there is no simple direct access to the truth.” - Stephen Bonnycastle, In Search of Authority pg 8

I have been collecting a lot of passages about truth. I think that we can search for the truth but that we can never find it unless we explore different ways of thinking. I have commented about this on a few of my favourite blogs.

For example, religion, myth, science, and the humanities all have something to say about the truth. If you put your all faith in only one of these disciplines, you can never get the entire truth. I think we need to be open-minded.

I find a lot of truth in fiction. Writers share their version of reality and truth with us all the time. We need to tune into this.

Science gives us a lot of answers but also a lot more questions.

Religion and myth attempt to answer some of life’s questions.

So where is “the” answer? Is there a direct way there?

Who knows? All I know is that I try to keep my eyes and ears open for tidbits of wisdom such as the one above. I believe that the truth is already out there just waiting for us to piece it together. It is a jigsaw puzzle. I’m just not sure that all of the pieces are still in the box.