"Wasteland"

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.