Fiction, Nonfiction and Truth

Fiction and nonfiction are not so easily divided, Fiction may not be real, but it's true; it goes beyond the garland of facts to get to emotional and psychological truths. As for nonfiction, for history, it may be real, but its truth is slippery, hard to access, with no fixed meaning bolted to it. If history doesn't become story, it dies to everyone except the historian. Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine.

—Yann Martel, in Beatrice and Virgil

Christian Consiousness

   Christian consciousness begins in the painful realization that what we have assumed was the truth is in fact a lie….

   The lies are impeccably factual. They contain no errors. There are no distortions or falsified data.  But they are lies all the same, because they claim to tell us who we are and omit everything about our origin in God and our destiny in God. They talk about the world without telling us that God made it. They tell us about our bodies without telling us that their temples of the Holy Spirit. They instruct us in love without telling us about the God who loves us and gave Himself for us.

—Eugene H. Peterson, from A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society

The Lockmaker

“If I found a key on the road, and discovered it fit, and opened, a particular lock in my house, I’d assume that most likely the key was made by the lockmaker.

And if I find a set of teachings set out in pre-modern oriental society that has proven itself with such universal validity, that has fascinated and satisfied millions of people in every century, including the best minds in history and the simplest hearts, that it has made itself at home in virtually every culture, inspired masterpieces of beauty in every field of art, continues to grow rapidly and spread and assert itself in lands a century ago where the name of Jesus Christ was not even heard.

Such teachings that obviously fits the locks of every human soul, in so many times and so many places, are they likely to be the work of a deceiver or a fool? In fact, it is more likely that they were designed, by the heartmaker.”

—G. K. Chesterton

All truth is God's truth

"All truth is God's truth. It doesn't matter who's saying it or where it's coming from; if it's true, it's from God. Even if it's from Fargo."



Cathleen Falsani, author of The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers.

Goodness

Click image to enlarge.

"Goodness," from Journey: New and Selected Poems, 1969-1999, by Kathleen Norris. Photo collage image by Wayne S.

I want what he wants

"I want God, not my idea of God; I want my neighbour, not my idea of my neighbour; I want myself, not my idea of myself -- C. S. Lewis.

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian novelist, dramatist and historian, died yesterday in Moscow. Here are two quotes from this remarkable thinker, writer and dissident. 

 It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the fIrst stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life. —FromThe Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume One) 

We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.

Al on Truth

If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor. –-Albert Einstein

On learning truth

I once thought that when you understood something, it was with you forever. I know now that this isn't so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all of our lives to remember the most basic things.
-Lucy Grealy