Truth

There was a point in my life -- somewhere around age twenty-two or twenty-three -- when I knew everything. My knowledge was complete and my faith in my comprehensive knowledge was unshakable. I was never, ever wrong.

Then my father died and for the first time in my life I began to realize that there is nothing in life that is absolute. From that moment onward, my life has been an endless struggle to find something that is a certainty. That struggle becomes less and less vigorous as the years go by and I become comfortable with the fact that there are no absolutes, that nothing is constant but change, and that I in fact know absolutely nothing and never have.

One of the concepts that I began to wrestle with while I worked on my master's degree is the idea of objective truth. Does such a concept exist, especially in an arena such as human interaction. Trials are predicated upon the belief that truth can be determined through rhetorical skill, that two opposing sides can present arguments to an objective jury who will then weigh that evidence and determine the truth.

And for me, right now, the closest I can come to an absolute truth is: "...there is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so." (Hamlet: Act II, scene ii)

It's funny how I am haunted by Hamlet. Back in my days of absolute certainty, Hamlet was the pinnacle of success for me. I'd have died to be cast in that role and auditioned for the play every chance I got. My first brush with it was as a freshman in college when I played a collection of the smaller roles, and then again the next year when the production was remounted and I played an expanded collection of the supporting roles. It was my first brush with complex language. I was cast as Bernardo, who is one of the courtiers who first sees the ghost of Hamlet's father. He tells Hamlet of the sighting, and the speech begins, "Last night of all, when yond same star..."

The director of that production scared the living daylights out of me in rehearsal by telling everyone, "That speech is the audience's first exposure to heightened language." Then he turned to me and said, "Don't fuck it up." I was terrified by that speech and I struggled to learn it. It was such an issue for me that my roommate told me I recited the speech in my sleep -- with a southern accent. I'm not sure I ever successfully introduced the audience to the heightened language of Hamlet, but I do know that when I stepped on the stage and delivered that speech, I knew I could.

As I begin to lose interest in the concept of truth, I become more interested in the idea of possibility. There is no life in truth. Life lives in possibility.

Life is bringing possibility to truth.

Good god, can you imagine how pompous and pedantic I would be if I drank?