The Slant to the Truth

It is easy to talk about the truth as if it is some universal aspect of life that people must embrace, lest they become deluded; to an extent this is true, the truth makes itself known, despite our best efforts. People cannot hide or erase reality, no matter how much we yearn to do so. And we do yearn to change the reality we find ourselves in, we can look to Jay Gatsby as an example. Always chasing after that green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan's dock, trying to escape his reality in favor of his ideal fantasy, which he found in the past. He desperately tried to, "beat on, boats against the current." Gatsby aims to ignore the truths of his reality, that his world was not perfect and that he could not make it perfect. We tend to call this denial.

This is not some phenomenon unique to Gatsby, at some point or another in life, we ourselves will come to lie to ourselves, whether it is about money or a relationship or grades; we have and will continue to lie to ourselves at various points in our life. That is what came to me when I read Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemingway.

Throughout the story, the central couple avoid talking about some operation (which i only just found out is an abortion... apparently I'm dense and this was obvious to the rest of the class. I actually thought the operation was trepanation.) Though this operation drives a wedge between the couple, neither truly want to discuss it. Further we have the symbolic white elephants. The symbol of the white elephant originated in Thailand, where the king would give white elephants to people he didn't like. This was because it was obscenely expensive to own a white elephant, both because they are picky eaters and also sacred and must be worshiped. Gradually the meaning turned into a gift that the recipient doesn't want.  We may also consider the common expression "the elephant in the room", which is to say, "the blatantly obvious thing that everybody is thinking about but no one wants to talk about." Taken together, the white elephant symbolizes our aversion to being told the truth.

Humans don't hate the truth. Quite the contrary, we hate being lied to, especially to our face. But at the same time we dislike being told truths that we find disagreeable. This is what Emily Dickinson wrote about when she wrote "Tell all the Truth but Tell it Slant". When Dickinson wrote "The Truth must dazzle gradually / or every man be blind" she referred to this very aversion of truths that we don't like to hear, the hard truth. We can't accept some truths because to do so would cause pain to ourselves. In our minds, acknowledging something gives that thing more power over us than if we exile it to the dark recesses of our minds.

Gatsby can't acknowledge that going to his ideal world where he has his money and Daisy loves him and has always loved him is impossible because to do so would leave him empty, he would have climbed the social ladder for naught in the end, and to acknowledge that would leave him powerless. Better to pursue a dream always just out of reach, coming ever closer to it but never truly reaching it; rather than acknowledging the futility of such a pursuit.

It is why the couple in Hills Like White Elephants can't bring themselves to really think about this procedure that weighs on their minds. Because to acknowledge it would be to obligate them to do something, and that meant change, one way or another. And change hurts, change is a hard path to walk, essential as it may be.

We can't acknowledge such unpleasant truths because to do so makes life harder, it makes life more painful. It forces us to relinquish control of our fate, and it abruptly tears us from the world we build for ourselves to face stark reality. Sometimes, its just easier to believe in something we may know to be false, even though we don't want to know it. This is what causes people to spend wildly out of their means, to find solutions at the bottom of a can of beer, to cling to relationships already dead, to ignore the world around them and pretend that for one moment the world is what we make of it, not what it makes of us. We prefer our facades to our truth.

Ultimately this calls to mind a section in my favorite video game, Dishonored. About midway through the game, you start a mission called "Lady Boyle's Last Party", in which you are tasked with assassinating an aristocrat funding a tyrannical regime. The mission takes place at a large party with the city's aristocrats in attendance, with no expense spared in a lavish mansion. The mission takes influence from the Edgar Allen Poe short story "Masque of the Red Death", and the two share common themes. In both, the elite try to hide away in their lavish bastions, they try to forget the plague that rages outside their doorstep, the truth knocking at the door.

They forget their own mortality, they have forgotten that death visits all equally, regardless of class. But it was easier to pretend that it was safe and everything was alright in their mansions, to pretend that for a moment the plague didn't actually exist, that they had control over their own fate. It was more painful to acknowledge the plague and the flaws of the world, as well as mortality, rather than give the truth absolute power over the aristocrats.

Whether it is Jig or Gatsby or Lady Boyle or Prince Prospero, people don't like unpleasant truths, and will go to great lengths to maintain their own ideal fantasies. It is another reminder that we choose the world we live in, by virtue of perception, that we desperately cling to our perception of what was and what ought to be when all else fails and our perception is the only thing remaining.

 "Strange, how there's always a little more innocence left to lose." -the Outsider, Dishonored (2012).