A Love Letter To Truth

Written by Abbey Markham, Age 18 May 29, 2018

My daughter, Abbey, had to write a four page essay for her AP English final. The instructions were to include their favorite authors from the literature that they had read over the year and what they had learned from them. They could choose to make it a love letter or from a reflective point of view. Abbey chose to write a love letter. I was completely moved to tears at the insightfulness of this young woman, my daughter. My eldest, Emily, and I spend hours analyzing philosophical ideas on a regular basis, but rarely does Abbey join in, she usually has her head buried in a book. I felt her love letter to truth was the quintessential idea behind this blog and that needed to be shared. I hope you enjoy it and that it give you reason to pause and reflect.

Dear Truth,

At the beginning of this year we were at odds. You were a thick fog that seemed tangible enough to touch and yet your frigid presence concealed your true identity. It was difficult to discern which of your faces was the real one, you are something different when you are with me than when you are with others. I couldn’t help but wonder who you were when you were by yourself, alone without the influence of others or the bias which I thrust upon you. Fortunately, this year has been a journey of coming to be at peace with your mystery, not coming to know you or truly grasp you, after all, I do not think that that is even remotely possible. But I write this letter so that you may appreciate your evolution of identity within my mind and heart that has been aided by many great writers and thinkers that I have become acquainted with this year.

At first, I was afraid… I was afraid that you would hurt me and cause irreparable damage within me. My good friend James Joyce shared his work with me, he tried to convince me that my fears were valid and that once I came to truly know you that you would destroy me.  Joyce told me a story, “Araby,” of a boy from Dublin that wanted this girl desperately. Although, the girl was not given a name, she was elusive just like you, Truth. She was bathed in light, it “lit up the hand upon the railing.” That image is stained in my mind, an image of light softly caressing her hand as if it were meant just for that boy, the nameless boy, as if it were meant to reach down and pull him up from his dreary fate with in Dublin. But the story was more hopeless than hopeful, the boy and girl seemed so far away, not even given a name, an identity, and even more so for the girl, as she was so bright against the dark, separated by the contrast and her place up on the stairs. Again, she reminded me of you, when I gaze upon you from afar so that you are more of an ethereal figure and not a reality, you seem so wonderful, as if everything I could ever want or need to be happy lies with you. The boy, though, he represented all my fears. He thought that if he could just go to the bazaar and get her something, since the girl had wanted to go but could not, that he might stand a chance of making his dreams of having her come to fruition. But in the end, most of the shops were closed, and he didn’t have enough money to get her something. Joyce painted a picture of this boy standing in the marketplace that had gone to sleep, the final light snuffed out suddenly, and the boy bathed in “darkness”, transformed into “a creature driven and derided by vanity.” When all the boy had wanted was the girl’s light, all he did was sentence himself to darkness. A darkness that permeated not just his physical image but further into his soul, into his identity, going so far as to dehumanize him into a “creature” who was so vain as to think that he even had a chance at changing his fate, at attaining what he hoped for. And if the girl was like you, beautiful and perfect and yet so far away, then I was the boy who wanted nothing but to have you. I knew that if James Joyce was indeed correct in his assumption of the girl and therefore you, that I might suffer the same devastating fate as the boy, that I might lose my very identity and everything that makes me who I am,  if I were to chase after you.

As the year went on, I became unsure of my conviction that you would devastate me. In fact, I came to believe that you might not exist at all, that maybe you were a figment of my imagination and had no place in the real world. A philosopher that I respect greatly provided me the inspiration for this conclusion. In his work “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense,” Friedrich Nietzsche wages a metaphorical war against you, Truth, and I had become his ally. He traces your existance all the way back to cognition and language, exposing the fact that neither are reliable and therefore you are not reliable, like a thief escaping in the night, not sure if you were ever there at all. Nietzsche mocks humankind for being so arrogant as to trust in their cognition because it, “casts a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of human beings, and because it contains within itself the most flattering evaluation of cognition it deceives them about the value of existence.” I take his words to mean that how people see and evaluate you will never be accurate because we live with bias, “a blinding fog”, in which we only want to see what we desire to see. Humans wish to see whatever is easiest to cope with and doesn’t rock the foundation of their world and therefore they never get to truly know you, Truth, because they don’t want to know you, they want to know their rose colored version of you. So in that sense, if there is no accurate version of you, then how can you really exist?  It seems that the answer is that you cannot, especially when you consider that the only common ground on which people can interpret you is flawed. Language is the basis of how we communicate, but Nietzsche points out that when we use language, we believe that we can identify things as the things that they actually are with words when, in fact, “we possess only metaphors of things in which no way correspond to the original entities.” So even when others, or even myself, try to establish your identity, we cannot because we are using words that have multiple meanings and are a diluted form of what they are meant to be. Yet, again, even as I try to grasp at you I cannot because there is no universal form with which to express you and so I ask myself again, how can you exist when you are nothing but a desperate whisper of words that crumble beneath the strain of variance within mankind? You can’t.

Then, I had to ask myself how do I live with the fact that the one thing I’m always searching for, begging for, yearning for doesn’t exist? How do I go through each day knowing that the words that pour out of others mouths regarding you cannot be trusted and, even more life altering, knowing that I cannot even trust myself ? I found a kindred spirit, going through this terrifying realization the same as me, as well as a resolution of sorts in Italo Calvino’s “The Flash.” Like the person in the work, I felt like “I understood nothing. Nothing, nothing about anything.” “Nothing” echoed in my head like a demons haunting whisper, over and over it repeated, so lost were the person in “The Flash” and I. Like the person, I wanted to yell, “Stop a second!… there’s something wrong! Everything’s wrong! We’re doing the absurdest things!”, because when you realize that you know nothing then it makes everything that the people around you deem “right” seem absurd. If you do not exist, Truth, then right and wrong do not exist and the rules that people live their lives by – walk on the right side of the sidewalk, don’t cheat, wear certain clothes, have manners– they don’t really matter, nothing matters. And yet even with the chaos that this realization ensues, the person in “The Flash” is, “filled with the hope that perhaps this will be [their] moment again, perhaps once again [they] shall understand nothing, [they] shall grasp that other knowledge found and lost in an instant.” It struck me hard, this last line. It struck me that maybe the knowledge that you don’t exist, Truth, is the only knowledge that I will ever really have and amongst the days where I get swept in the flow of the world and again begin to think that I know you, I should only hope to come back to this place where I can acknowledge that I was never meant to grasp you. There is a peace that comes with surrender, my surrender of any ownership I thought I had of you. It transforms the way that I want to live my life, less of a never ending search for you and more of an existence where every second is experienced and appreciated just the way it is. In Wallace Stevens words, I now strive to be a snowman, “the listener, who listens in the snow,/And nothing himself, beholds/ Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” I strive to be content with you, Truth, for everything that you are and are not, knowing that you will never be mine to have and to hold. But I promise to never let a day go by where I don’t think of you, The Wanderer, Master of Many Faces, and think that there is beauty in the way that you exist by not existing, different in the eyes of everyone, but always precious to me.

With much love,

Abbey