And the Truth is...

All of yesterday’s plans dissolved in the rain. Perhaps there will be a few breaks in the weather today. Not likely, but there’s always a chance.

Since rain filled the afternoon, it made sense to sit back and enjoy some reading; but that was after a morning of racewalking in the rain at Bidwell and after a few hours of website development work for the Plant Barn.

I have mentioned before that once a week I pick up boxes of discarded books from the Chico library and take them to the Friends of the Library organization in Orland for sorting and inclusion in the semi-annual book sales. And we always look through the boxes to see if there is anything worth reading. Intuition is no help here and we often find that there was a good reason that the book we selected was discarded in Chico. But this week, my selections have been pretty good.

I’m about halfway through David Lindsey’s book, Body of Truth. And like the reviewers, I have a love/hate opinion of the book and of his writing. His description of life in Guatemala may be overblown at times, but you have to remember that it was written during the early 90’s and the value of human life was cheap in Guatemala at that time. It may still be. But what got my attention were a few paragraphs starting on page 247. Here he talks about the writings of Heinrich Böll.

This is what I read, “… an interviewer asked him if he thought of written history as lies? He said no, not lies perhaps, but it was more like a narrative of inaccuracies in as much as one can never precisely reconstruct it, and it therefore contains untruths. Böll said that, at bottom, truth was an ‘assembled’ thing. That it could not be found in one place, not in one book, one man’s perspective, not in one man’s testimony, or one governments history. These he implied, were only particles of truth. They had to be assembled, collated to get at the greater thing itself…

Böll said that truth was so difficult to get at because the documents that we gather together in order to assemble the truth may not in themselves be truthful to begin with. He says that we know that governments and statesmen lie to each other and that these lies are sometimes recorded (as the truth, of course) in the documents which we then assemble (unaware of their deceit) like so many particles, and with the best of intentions, into a ‘body’ of truth that really is not the truth at all.”

This is something, a ‘truth’, that I have maintained for years now. It was nice to see it in print.