They used to say people were honest
with each other. I lived amongst them a skeptic. These days though,
I've learned that trust is not merely a construct of the human
relationship, but in large part it is an illusory aspect of human
perception.
"What good is truth?
"George; my words are just words."
"But truth is a word."
"True."
That was five months ago; preceding the
question of the value of truth, he asked if what we did here was
worth doing. I thought I spoke to George like I spoke to all my
students. But he was broken. I spent the entire semester trying to
make it clear, and I thought abundantly so, that purpose is the only
truth that exists. That language is inferior in its attempt to define
purpose; that action as intention orients perception; that
consciousness is arrived at vicariously through that which exists in
the realm of the Other.
George's perspective was different
though. Just months before he came to our class on Nietzsche's
"Twilight of the Idols" with a suitcase, wearing tattered
clothing, as if he'd just escaped the grip of demonic charge. I was
preparing my lecture notes as he approached my lectern. It was odd;
the room seemed desolate of sound. The only thing I noticed before he
confronted me was that silence; indeed... accompanied by the stench
of terror and tragedy. "Professor, my family is dead."
The page of Nietzsche I was on seemed
to consolidate it's ink into an odd abyss. I could feel my gaze
strengthen on the page. Nietzsche wasn't a philosopher, but a
philologist; he was a geneticist of ideas. I couldn't see concepts in
his pages then. I only saw... rather, I only felt a desolation that I
still find difficult to realize in memory.
I raised my eyes to George. It was
strange, the strength with which he told me that he lost his family.
His family... gone. "George, what happened?"
"There was a fire."
"A fire..."
"Yes."
"Are you alright?"
This exchange haunts me to this day. I
still teach that class on Nietzsche's book: "How to Philosophize
with a Hammer." Nietzsche would have appreciated the absurdity
in the question I posed to George. Are you alright? I fear that if I
try to put into language the appropriateness of that question, the
absurdity will dissipate. Camus reveled in the absurd; an absurdist's
embrace of the void. And when one asks a... child... if he is
alright, what does one expect to receive back in that exchange?
Irony: seeing a void, a creator of
desolation come alive. George found truth; the rest of us only beckon
toward it like vagrants. Truth wasn't lost to George. Just his
family.
