My grandfather, a man whom I never got the pleasure of meeting, a man who has been viewed through 46 years of myth and who, even after a year of demythologizing my uncle after his death, I still suspect I would have enjoyed knowing, lived his life by a few basic rules that, pretty much, hold true not matter what.
One of those had to do with respect: always call a man “Sir” until you have a reason to call him a son of a bitch to his face. Keeping this in mind keeps you from taking others for granted.
His rule that if you sit down at a card game for money with strangers and you can’t spot the mark you should get up because it’s you holds true particluarly in the day and age of competative poker. This allows you to remember that not every stranger has kindness in his heart, and that people will do the most vile things for money.
Truth can be found in the most surprising places. I’ve often thought that small but important truths hide themselves in fiction simply so that we have the pleasure of absorbing them in a dramatic rather than rhetorical context. Take this little gem from one of the best things on television today: “It is naive to believe that the horrible things that happen to us have simple explanations. To think that they have simple explanations allows us to believe we have control when we don’t.”1 It is the nature of truth, though, that has interested me most of late.
We are taught to believe, at least at base, that expressions, whether they be promises, exhortations, or simply life, have but two modes: true or false. It doesn’t take much of a brain to scrape away that top layer and realize that some things are only true under certain situations: I am pulled immediately back to first period junior year chemistry lab in high school; my partner and I failed all of our experiments but still made good grades simply because we tried. It was marvelous. It was so unlike life.
So how, then, does the idea that something can be true when uttered but not true if conditions change apply to human relationships?
Is the strength of the promise made, and then broken, determined by its feasibility? Promise me the moon and I’ll give you the stars doesn’t seem all that achievable, yet, uttered in the right tone under the right circumstances, almost any promise no matter how unrealistic can be made to seem real, desirable, and worthy of trusting.
Or is the absoluteness of the truth, and the strength of any promise, really simply an illusion governed by whim, shifting circumstances, and the will of the individuals involved? Are desire, will, and outside forces the base, agent, and reagent of human interaction?
More to the point, is it possible for something to be true one day and then equally false after circumstances change, like those chemistry experiments Cathy and I did so badly at?
Given recent rather pointed and still painful experience, I’m going to have to go with this: there are no absolute truths when it comes to relationships. What may be true today may not be true tomorrow and the only thing we can do is be careful and honest, and make sure that we are unafraid to say we don’t know when we don’t know.
Oh, yes, and my grandfather’s third rule applies: it is always better to say “I’ll do my best” than it is to make a promise you aren’t 100% positive you can keep.
Notes:
- “Hero”, Battlestar Galactica, original air date November 17, 2006