Truth for Something That Seems

Truth For something that seems so simple at first glance, truth is incredibly complex. I often wonder exactly what is true, or how I know it is. So often, I feel like I and others are only relying on the deep gut feeling we get when we believe something is true, or really want something to be true. In the end, it is possible that the only truth there really is whatever we want to be true -- that we create our realities.

Of course, this means that truth is purely subjective -- as particular to each individual as a favorite taste or smell. If this is true, then we can only know another person's truth the way we know what they look like from their shadow.

Think about the last time you tried to describe the feeling of something to a friend, and they tried to match the same description -- there is an ongoing back and forth of "No, it wasn't quite like that," and "I'm not making myself clear." Eventually, the two of you might have agreed on a description of the experience, but even then you both probably realized how impossible it is to share an experience -- not the external event, but the internal processing of and reaction to it -- with any other individual.

If truth is so subjective, I have a hard time labeling it as "truth." I can't really say, then, that I have truth in my life, either as a basic concept or as certain knowledge about any fact or situation.

I don't mean this to sound depressing, like some Southern belle gliding despairingly out onto the veranda, arm up to my flung-back forehead, forlornly crying to the empty muggy air, "I do decleah, theah is no truth in mah lahf!" I certainly don't consider it depressing to realize that there might not be any truth in life; that nothing is actually certain or decided. To me, this lack of truth is exciting.

There is a nebulousness at the bottom of everything, some ethereal and indefinable non-substance from which all substance and all events are moldable. Each of us gets to create meaning -- I still hesitate to say truth -- for ourselves. This is something I am also greatly drawn to in the study of literature, specifically when dealing with the issue of the speaker in poetry or the narrator in a piece of prose.

The author of a work, for all intents and purposes, is the god of that work -- they are infallible by definition. The work is created exactly as they created it, and therefore truth exists insofar as the work exists. Yet this is as far as truth can be observed in a work of fiction, because the narrator/speaker is always different from the author, and therefore the text we read as relayed by this narrator/speaker is only as reliable as they themselves.

This is made explicitly clear in stories told from the first person perspective; often, the foibles and fallacies of the narrator are an essential part of the story, both for the reader and the characters and plot involved. The sense of play that a lack or incompleteness of truth allows is wonderful, and something I don't think I would ever trade for having concrete beliefs about reality. This is not to say that I believe in a total disregard for what we -- or I -- perceive as reality.

This would be an impractical way to go through life; there is so much consensus about so many things -- mathematical facts, what the sun looks and feels like, why trying to walk across a burning highway with speeding two-ton combustion engines hiding behind huge steel frames and fiberglass careening towards your spindly flesh-and-bone frame is a bad idea -- that it would be pure idiocy to regard them with total skepticism. Regarding them with the.