At 5:34 PM -0700 10/20/02, Karen Watters Cole wrote:
It would be nice to hear from the
many other FWers who read but do not speak up at all or infrequently, but
even if everyone else maintains this same simple two-dimensional
perspective, it doesn't change the fact that history teaches that there is
always more than one side to the truth.
Hi Karen,
I read more fiction than NEWS which allows me to share this
little gem. (I won't
attempt a synopsis of the novel. Check this website out if you want
more context:)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/stores/detail/-/books/0553289640/reviews/ref=pm_dp_ln_b_6/102-7645177-8065762
An excerpt from the novel:
Body of
Truth
David Lindsey
1992 Doubleday
1992 Doubleday
p. 247-
248
"This is a mad society. We do things like this . . ." Grajeda let the words fade away, his eyes settling on the scattered newspapers. Then he looked up. "Do you read very much, Mr. Haydon? Fiction, I mean?"
"Some."
Do you know the novels of Heinrich Boll?"
"I've read Group Portrait with Lady and The Clown."
"Really?" Grajeda smiled hugely, surprised. He almost laughed.
"How interesting. I am surprised. I mean . . ."
"I have a degree in literature,"Haydon said, himself amused at Grajeda's reaction. "I didn't come out of the womb a policeman."
This time Grajeda did laugh. "This is a wonderful thing," he said.
"What . . . Ah . . ."
"My father was a well-read man," Haydon said. "He had an excellent library, which I still have, and certain ideas about what an educated man should be. I got a degree in literature, which was fine with him, but it wasn't what he had wanted for me. He was a lawyer, and he wanted me to be a lawyer too. I entered law school and stayed two years. But I walked away from it. Then I joined the police force."
Grajeda listened to
this brief biography with an expression of delight. "What a
wonderful story," he said. "I am happy to hear
it." He looked at Haydon, smiling, the surprise still in
his eyes. Then he caught himself. "So, good,
you know the man, then, Heinrich Boll. I once read an interview
with Boll in which the interviewer asked him if he thought of written
history as lies. He said, no, not lies perhaps, but it is more
like a narrative of inaccuracies in as much as one can never precisely
reconstruct it, and it therefore contains untruths. Boll 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 government's
history. These he implied, were only particles of truth.
They had to be assembled, collated to get at the greater thing
itself. I thought about that a lot after I read it. It is
such an obvious thing, yet until someone says it right out like that
one seems not to be cognizant of it. It seems to me that all too
often we go through life holding only the particles in our hands,
thinking all along that we possess the whole thing itself.
"Boll 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 by truthful to begin with. He says that we know that governments and statesmen lie to each other and that these lies sometimes are recorded (as truth, of course) in documents which we then assemble (unaware of their deceit) like so many particles, and with the best intentions, into a body of 'truth' that really is not the truth at all."
Grajeda looked at Haydon a moment. "And there you have it," he said. "The death and resurrection of Lena Muller, so intertwined with the death of XX that we may never know Boll's 'assembled truth.' It may not be possible to discover even in a thousand years. We, you and I, are principals in this story, a story that hasn't yet finished being told, and even we don't know the pieces of truth that fall within our own purview. As a matter of fact, you are here now, trying to decipher the lies that you have been told, in search of the truth. We have even contributed to the lies . . . or, forgive me, at least I have. It's a shameful thing, really, what habitual deceit can do to people, even a whole people, like Guatemalans . . . or Americans."
"Boll 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 by truthful to begin with. He says that we know that governments and statesmen lie to each other and that these lies sometimes are recorded (as truth, of course) in documents which we then assemble (unaware of their deceit) like so many particles, and with the best intentions, into a body of 'truth' that really is not the truth at all."
Grajeda looked at Haydon a moment. "And there you have it," he said. "The death and resurrection of Lena Muller, so intertwined with the death of XX that we may never know Boll's 'assembled truth.' It may not be possible to discover even in a thousand years. We, you and I, are principals in this story, a story that hasn't yet finished being told, and even we don't know the pieces of truth that fall within our own purview. As a matter of fact, you are here now, trying to decipher the lies that you have been told, in search of the truth. We have even contributed to the lies . . . or, forgive me, at least I have. It's a shameful thing, really, what habitual deceit can do to people, even a whole people, like Guatemalans . . . or Americans."
