LIES

I lie sometimes, I don’t know why but I do. I fibbed just yesterday, it came out so easily & before it even registered I had created a bit fat lie. One of my favourite quotes is from Henry David Thoreau: Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I try so hard to live by this but so often the later gets sacrificed on account of the former. It would be so easy to just say truth is relative, that there is no absolute moral truth, but I don’t believe it….that’s a cop-out – a coward’s philosophy. The great Keats poem Ode on a Grecian urn closes with the line “Truth is beauty, beauty is truth,” that is all ye know on earth & all ye need to know, T.S. Elliot once said that these lines were a blight on an otherwise beautiful poem & when I think about it I am apt to agree with him. Not only can beauty be fleeting, but it can mesmerise us into believing anything. But who really knows in what context Keats wrote those famous lines, it may be that it was to urge us to find beauty in truth which is steadfast through the ages rather than seeking truth from beauty which is temporal - just as the contents of the urn are.

As for me, I will continue to try not to engage in falsehoods (even little white lies that I say just to appease others, or worse still to appease myself), lest I continue to live a lie.

“May you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you're dead."

-old Irish toast-