I never considered the truth".
Immediate Family: Hilton Als talks to Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts – and "the poet who writes prose; the memoirist who considers the truth specious; the essayist whose books amount to a kind of fairy tale," in the New Yorker.
Justice Robert W. Doyle told the jurors not to consider the truth or falsity of what Mr. Conroy said Mr. Overton had told him, but to use the testimony only as a way of understanding Mr. Conroy's state of mind.
And, while this was all very absorbing to consider — the truth in lies, the deceit in action — I was only half interested in the points the play tried to make, because they felt just like that: points.
Hecataeus of Miletus, the best known of the logographers, defined his task in his Genealogia (c. 490 bce) as follows: "I write what I consider the truth, for the things the Greeks tell us are in my opinion full of contradictions and worthy to be laughed out of court".
It's Nelson's articulation of her many selves — the poet who writes prose; the memoirist who considers the truth specious; the essayist whose books amount to a kind of fairy tale, in which the protagonist goes from darkness to light, and then falls in love with a singular knight — that makes her readers feel hopeful.
Consider the truth and clarity of "serve the people" compared with the average company's mission statement, packed with a muddle of words and thoughts tied to stakeholders and CSR, that employees can barely read, let alone memorise.Deng Xiaoping's slogan, which he used in his campaign to revive the economy, had similar virtues.
And, although the Hillsborough families have had to wait until now for anything approaching what they might consider "the truth", we should also remember the work undertaken by Lord Justice Taylor in his inquiry into Hillsborough in the months after the disaster.
