Motivated update: woooo, soooo motivated.
I am so tired. I've been up since yesterday night, 'finding more and more ingenious ways of wasting time' and then finally thought of something more impassioned to debate over in my nearly-late term paper, and spent sweat, blood, tears, and knowledge in writing it out. Or at least writing out the quotes to support me.
Neil Gaiman and George R.R. Martin, you two can haunt my dreams with your tales any day.
Wish I dreamed in Red Dwarf, though, at least it got me the idea to begin with.
"You've got no magnifigance in your soul, have you (Rimmer)?" started it, though I thought of it in a slightly different context.
In any case, here's the hastily written paper, followed by excerpts of the material I used as quotes, and where I got them from. I put enough thought, if not enough actual work, into connecting it, that I feel proud enough to include it here.
Belief makes us human
To keep this introduction short, I spend enough time pondering the seeming idiocies that I see others follow, and debate over their usefulness, so this paper will be a proposition over why so many follow such ludicrous ideas, ideals, and beliefs with such devotion. I have heard an answer hinted in tales filled with fantasy and outright fiction the most, but also alluded to in the normalcy of biographies and interviews (some of which are with the writers of the aforementioned, I must admit). I believe it all boils down to the simple fact that as a species, as a group, and just as important, as an individual, one needs a sense of mystery and wonder in the world to encourage thought, imagination, and passion of emotion and purpose. Without that sense, that encouragement, life would be very frightening, dull, and meaningless.
I must admit I feel foolish to be quoting fiction and writers of fiction to emphasis my points, but as Neil Gaiman says (see excerpt1), fiction (and stories in general) are mirrors, and like mirrors “appear to tell the truth, to reflect life back out at us; but set a mirror correctly and it will lie so convincingly you’ll believe that something has vanished into thin air...Angle it right and a mirror becomes magic casement; it can show you anything you can imagine and maybe a few things you can’t.” Stories, he points out, are like these distorting mirrors, “a concealing mirror, set at forty-five degrees to reality, but it’s a mirror nonetheless, which we can use to tell ourselves things we might not otherwise see.” In such stories we find truths, slivers of the normalcy, threads of this shared humanity that make the fantastic believable and real, and bring it close to our hearts. Another author, George R.R. Martin, makes some of the same comparisons in his editor’s introduction of a horror anthology, “Good horror stories make us look at our reflections in dark distorting mirrors, where we glimpse things that disturb us, things that we did not really want to look at. Horror looks into the shadows of the human soul, at the fears and rages that live within us all. But darkness is meaningless without light, and horror is pointless without beauty. The best horror stories are stories first and horror second, and however much they scare us, they do more than that as well…They concern themselves not simply with fear, but with life in all its infinite variety…with the whole range of experiences and emotions that make up the human condition…The best horror stories tell us truths.” So fiction is a way to tell the truth by surrounding it with beautiful lies, with ‘truisms’ that seem more true than truth itself, and by filling it with emotion and wonder and life. It is a glimpse of reality, though perhaps contorted, twisted, misconstrued and beautifully biased to make its point. (Oddly enough, ‘beautify’ is an antonym to ‘distort’)
Do such independently arrived at implications into the nature of stories and fiction explain why it is so permeated in each and every human life, regardless of locale, literacy, and technology? I am confident in my extrapolation that there is not one culture or society without a myth or a legend, without a miraculous religion or faithful belief. Why are we all as a species, drawn to such stories, such ‘truisms’ hidden in the fantastical lies of fiction? I know my self-discovered answer, and it is deceptively simple. Every human dreams. We dream of goals, in life, in strange fanciful realms of spirit and emotion and beauty. We dream of purpose and knowledge, of explanation and understanding. Most of all we dream of sharing our dreams, lessening the lonesome gap of our perspective universes. Or in Gaiman’s more precise words, “Writing is flying in dreams. When you remember. When you can. When it works. It’s that easy.” This does indeed explain our obvious show our love of any stories. Just as the next quote (Martin’s again) explains for me a love of fantasy, “The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real…for a moment at least…that long magic moment before we wake…We read fantasy to find the colors again, to taste strong spices and hear the song the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.” To keep quoting Martin, in a slightly different context, “Knowledge is what man is all about… he also needs mystery, and poetry, and romance… he needs a few unanswered questions to make him brood and wonder” (excerpt2). I could not say either truth much better if I tried.
So we prefer the lies as we edge about the truths. That is why this next line seems so chilling in its veracity, “The truth will set us free. But freedom is cold and empty and frightening, and lies can often be warm and beautiful.” (I could quote much more from this Martin piece, but encourage you instead to read the selection I provided in excerpt3.) We need the lies to dampen the fear, the despair, to give the surviving hope one cannot live without.
The truth that we are alone can be the most frightening of all. Many spend hours trying to connect with their fellow humans, to understand their drives, their beliefs, their reasoning and logic. More still view it as a hopeless attempt but try again and again to bring even one person to support their belief, their view, their story. A countless number argue and debate and hold to their own beliefs like a drowning man in a flood, regardless of whether such a belief is indeed worth it, whether anyone believes them and supports them, or is indeed if it is a logical point of reasoning. For this proof, I need not quote anything; it is a truism in itself. Regardless of where one looks, it holds firm in its verity.
In conclusion, the simple reason we believe, regardless of what we believe in, is to be happy and have a purpose to our lives.
Excerpt from the introduction to Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors:
They do it with mirrors. It’s a cliché, of course, but it’s also true. Magicians have been using mirrors, usually set at a forty-five-degree angle, ever since the Victorians began to manufacture reliable, clear mirrors in quantity, well over a hundred years ago John Nevil Maskelyne began it, in 1862, with a wardrobe that, thanks to a cunningly placed mirror, concealed more than it revealed.
Mirrors are wonderful things. They appear to tell the truth, to reflect life back out at us; but set a mirror correctly and it will lie so convincingly you’ll believe that something has vanished into thin air, that a box filled with doves and flags and spiders is actually empty, that people hidden in the wings or the pit are floating ghosts upon the stage. Angle it right and a mirror becomes magic casement; it can show you anything you can imagine and maybe a few things you can’t.
(The smoke blurs the edges of things.)
Stories are, in one way or another, mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn’t work. Like mirrors, stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in the darkness.
Fantasy-and all fiction is fantasy of one kind or another-is a mirror. A distorting mirror, to be sure, and a concealing mirror, set at forty-five degrees to reality, but it’s a mirror nonetheless, which we can use to tell ourselves things we might not otherwise see. (Fairy tales, as G.K. Chesterton once said, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.)…
Excerpt from “With Morning comes Mistfall” from George R.R. Martin’s
Dreamsongs Volume 1:
“…Dave Gregor had captained the ship that had discovered Wraithworld, nearly seventy-five years earlier. He had probed through the mists with his sensors, and set his ship down on the seacoast plains. Then he sent teams out to explore.
There were two men in each team, both well armed. But in one case, only a single man came back, and he was in hysteria. He and his partner had gotten separated in the mists, and suddenly he heard a bloodcurdling scream. When he found his friend, he was quite dead. And something was standing over the body.
The survivor described the killer as manlike, eight feet tall, and somehow insubstantial. He claimed that when he fired at it, the blaster bold went right through it. Then the creature had wavered, and vanished in the mists.
Gregor sent other teams out to search for the thing. They recovered the body, but that was all. Without special instruments, it was difficult to find the same place twice in the mists. Let alone something like the creature that had been described.
So the story was never confirmed. But nonetheless, it caused a sensation when Gregor returned to Earth. Another ship was sent to conduct a more thorough search. It found nothing. But one of its search teams disappeared without a trace.
And the legend of the mist wraiths was born…”
***********************
“…There was evidence, I thought. And some of it was hard to deny. But Dubowski was shaking his head vigorously.
“The Gregor affair proves nothing,” he said. “You know as well as I this planet has never been explored thoroughly. Especially the plains area, where Gregor’s ship put down. It was probably some sort of animal that killed that man. A rare animal of some sort native to that area.”
“What about the testimony of his partner?” Sanders asked.
“Hysteria, pure and simple.”
“The other sightings? There have been an awful lot of them. And the witnesses weren’t always hysterical.”
“Proves nothing,” Dubowski said, shaking his head. “Back on Earth, plenty of people still claim to have seen ghosts and flying saucers. And here, with those damned mists, mistakes and hallucinations are naturally even easier.”
*************************
“Because. Because he’s going to destroy this world, if I let him. By the time he and his kind get through, there won’t be a mystery left in the universe.”
“He’s just trying to find some answers. Do the wraiths exist? What about the ruins? Who built them? Didn’t you ever want to know those things, Sanders?”
“Of course,” he said when he had his drink. “Everyone’s wondered about those questions. That’s why people come here to Wraithworld, to the Castle Cloud. Each guy who touches down here is secretly hoping he’ll have an adventure wit the wraiths, and find out all the answers personally.
So he doesn’t. So he slaps on a blaster and wanders around the mist forests for a few days, or a few weeks, and finds nothing. So what? He can come back and search again. The dream is still there, and the romance, and the mystery.
And who knows? Maybe one trip he glimpses a wraith drifting through the mists. Or something he thinks is a wraith. And then he’ll go home happy, ‘cause he’s been part of a legend. He’s touched a little bit of creation that hasn’t had all the awe and wonder ripped from it yet by Dubowski’s sort.
Dubowski! Bah! He makes me boil. He comes here with his ship full of lackeys and his million credit grant and all his gadgets, to hunt for wraiths. Oh, he’ll get them all right. That’s what frightens me. Either he’ll prove they don’t exist, or he’ll find them and they’ll turn out to be some kind of submen or animal or something.
And that will ruin it. Ruin it, you hear! He’ll answer all the questions with his gadgets, and there’ll be nothing left for anyone else. It isn’t fair.”
****************************
There was silence. Then Sanders spoke, but his voice was beaten. “Just one question,” he said softly. “Why?”
That brought Dubowski up short, and his smile faded. “You never have understood, have you, Sanders? It was for truth. To free this planet from ignorance and superstition.”
“Free Wraithworld?” Sanders said. “Was it enslaved?”
“Yes, enslaved by foolish myth. By fear. Now this planet will be free, and open. We can find out the truth behind those ruins now, without murky legends about half-human wraiths to fog the facts. We can open this planet for colonization. People won’t be afraid to come here, and live, and farm. We’ve conquered the fear.”
…”You’re the one who doesn’t understand, Doctor. Don’t kid yourself. You haven’t freed Wraithworld. You’ve destroyed it. You’ve stolen its wraiths, and left an empty planet.”
“I think you’re wrong…but even if you were correct, well, it’s just too bad. Knowledge is what man is all about. People like you have tried to hold back progress since the beginning of time. But they failed, and you failed. Man needs to know.”
“Maybe, but is that the only thing man needs? I don’t think so. I think he also needs mystery, and poetry, and romance. I think he needs a few unanswered questions to make him brood and wonder.”
Excerpt from “The Way of Cross and Dragon” by George R.R. Martin
from Dreamsongs Volume 1:
“I made it all up,” he repeated. He hefted the book fondly. “I drew on many sources, of course, especially the Bible, but I do think of Cross and Dragon as mostly my own work. It’s rather good, don’t you agree? Of course, I could hardly put my name on it, proud as I am of it, but I did include my imprimatur. Did you notice that? It was the closest I dared come to a byline.”
“You startle me,” I admitted. “I expected to find an inventive madman, some poor self-deluded fool, firm in his belief that he had spoken to God. I’ve dealt with such fanatics before. Instead I find a cheerful cynic who has invented a religion for his own profit. I think I prefer the fanatics. You are beneath contempt, Father Lukyan. You will burn in hell for eternity.”
“I doubt it,” Lukyan said, “but you do mistake me, Father Damien. I am no cynic, nor do I profit from my dear Saint Judas. Truthfully, I lived more comfortably as a priest of your own Church. I do this because it is my vocation.”
I sat down. “You confuse me,” I said. “Explain.”
“Now I am going to tell you the truth,” he said. He said it in an odd way, almost a chant. “I am a Liar,” he added.
“You want to confuse me with a child’s paradoxes,” I snapped.
“No, no.” He smiled. “A Liar. With a capital. It is an organization, Father Damien. A religion, you might call it. A great and powerful faith. And I am the smallest part of it.”
“I know of no such church,” I said.
“Oh, no, you wouldn’t. It’s secret. It has to be. You can understand that, can’t you? People don’t like being lied to.”
“I do not like being lied to,” I said.
Lukyan looked wounded. “I told you this would be the truth, didn’t I? When a Liar says that, you can believe him. How else could we trust each other?”
“There are many of you?” I asked. I was starting to think that Lukyan was a madman after all, as fanatical as any heretic, but in a more complex way. Here was a heresy within a heresy, but I recognized my duty: to find the truth of things, and set them right.
“Many of us,” Lukyan said, smiling. “You would be surprised, Father Damien, really you would. But there are some things I dare not tell you.”
“Tell me what you dare, then.”
“Happily,” said Lukyan Judasson. “We Liars, like those of all other religions, have several truths we take on faith. Faith is always required. There are some things that cannot be proven. We believe that life is worth living. That is an article of faith. The purpose of life is to live, to resist death, perhaps to defy entropy.
We also believe that happiness is a good, something to be sought after.”
“The Church does not oppose happiness,” I said drily.
“I wonder,” Lukyan said. “But let us not quibble. Whatever the Church’s position on happiness, it does preach belief in an afterlife, in a supreme being and a complex moral code.”
“True.”
“The Liars believe in no afterlife, no God. We see the universe as it is, Father Damien, and these naked truths are cruel ones. We who believe in life, and treasure it, will die. Afterward there will be nothing, eternal emptiness, blackness, nonexistence. In our living there has been no purpose, no poetry, no meaning. Nor do our deaths possess these qualities. When we are gone, the universe will not long remember us, and shortly it will be as if we never lived at all. Our worlds and our universe will not long outlive us. Ultimately, entropy will consume all, and our puny efforts cannot stay that awful end. It will be gone. It has never been. It has never mattered. The universe itself is doomed, transient, uncaring.”
I slid back in my chair, and a shiver went through me as I listened to poor Lukyan’s dark words. I found myself fingering my crucifix. “A bleak philosophy,” I said, “as well as a false one. I have had that fearful vision myself. I think all of us do, at some point. But it is not so, Father. My faith sustains me against such nihilism. It is a shield against despair.”
“Oh, I know that, my friend, my Knight Inquisitor,” Lukyan said. “I’m glad to see you understand so well. You are almost one of us already.
You’ve touched the heart of it. The truths, the great truths-and most of the lesser ones as well-they are unbearable for most men. We find our shield in faith. Your faith, my faith, any faith. It doesn’t matter, so long as we believe, really and truly believe, in whatever lie we cling to.” He fingered the ragged edges of his great blond beard. “Our psychs have always told us that believers are the happy ones, you know. They may believe in Christ or Buddha or Erika Stormjones, in reincarnation or immortality or nature, in the power of love or the platform of a political faction, but it all comes to the same thing. They believe. They are happy. It is the ones who have seen truth who despair, and kill themselves. The truths are so vast, the faiths so little, so poorly made, so riddled with error and contradiction that we see around them and through them, and then we feel the weight of darkness upon us, and can no longer be happy.”
I am not a slow man. I knew, by then, where Lukyan Judasson was going. “Your Liars invent faiths.”
He smiled. “Of all sorts. Not only religious. Think of it. We know truth for the cruel instrument it is. Beauty is infinitely preferable to truth. We invent beauty. Faiths, political movements, high ideals, belief in love and fellowship. All of them are lies. We tell those lies, among others, endless others. We improve on history and myth and religion, make each more beautiful, better, easier to believe in. Our lies are not perfect, of course. The truths are too big. But perhaps someday we will find one great lie that all humanity can use. Until then, a thousand small lies will do.”
***********
The truth will set us free.
But freedom is cold and empty and frightening, and lies can often be warm and beautiful.
Neil Gaiman and George R.R. Martin, you two can haunt my dreams with your tales any day.
Wish I dreamed in Red Dwarf, though, at least it got me the idea to begin with.
"You've got no magnifigance in your soul, have you (Rimmer)?" started it, though I thought of it in a slightly different context.
In any case, here's the hastily written paper, followed by excerpts of the material I used as quotes, and where I got them from. I put enough thought, if not enough actual work, into connecting it, that I feel proud enough to include it here.
Belief makes us human
To keep this introduction short, I spend enough time pondering the seeming idiocies that I see others follow, and debate over their usefulness, so this paper will be a proposition over why so many follow such ludicrous ideas, ideals, and beliefs with such devotion. I have heard an answer hinted in tales filled with fantasy and outright fiction the most, but also alluded to in the normalcy of biographies and interviews (some of which are with the writers of the aforementioned, I must admit). I believe it all boils down to the simple fact that as a species, as a group, and just as important, as an individual, one needs a sense of mystery and wonder in the world to encourage thought, imagination, and passion of emotion and purpose. Without that sense, that encouragement, life would be very frightening, dull, and meaningless.
I must admit I feel foolish to be quoting fiction and writers of fiction to emphasis my points, but as Neil Gaiman says (see excerpt1), fiction (and stories in general) are mirrors, and like mirrors “appear to tell the truth, to reflect life back out at us; but set a mirror correctly and it will lie so convincingly you’ll believe that something has vanished into thin air...Angle it right and a mirror becomes magic casement; it can show you anything you can imagine and maybe a few things you can’t.” Stories, he points out, are like these distorting mirrors, “a concealing mirror, set at forty-five degrees to reality, but it’s a mirror nonetheless, which we can use to tell ourselves things we might not otherwise see.” In such stories we find truths, slivers of the normalcy, threads of this shared humanity that make the fantastic believable and real, and bring it close to our hearts. Another author, George R.R. Martin, makes some of the same comparisons in his editor’s introduction of a horror anthology, “Good horror stories make us look at our reflections in dark distorting mirrors, where we glimpse things that disturb us, things that we did not really want to look at. Horror looks into the shadows of the human soul, at the fears and rages that live within us all. But darkness is meaningless without light, and horror is pointless without beauty. The best horror stories are stories first and horror second, and however much they scare us, they do more than that as well…They concern themselves not simply with fear, but with life in all its infinite variety…with the whole range of experiences and emotions that make up the human condition…The best horror stories tell us truths.” So fiction is a way to tell the truth by surrounding it with beautiful lies, with ‘truisms’ that seem more true than truth itself, and by filling it with emotion and wonder and life. It is a glimpse of reality, though perhaps contorted, twisted, misconstrued and beautifully biased to make its point. (Oddly enough, ‘beautify’ is an antonym to ‘distort’)
Do such independently arrived at implications into the nature of stories and fiction explain why it is so permeated in each and every human life, regardless of locale, literacy, and technology? I am confident in my extrapolation that there is not one culture or society without a myth or a legend, without a miraculous religion or faithful belief. Why are we all as a species, drawn to such stories, such ‘truisms’ hidden in the fantastical lies of fiction? I know my self-discovered answer, and it is deceptively simple. Every human dreams. We dream of goals, in life, in strange fanciful realms of spirit and emotion and beauty. We dream of purpose and knowledge, of explanation and understanding. Most of all we dream of sharing our dreams, lessening the lonesome gap of our perspective universes. Or in Gaiman’s more precise words, “Writing is flying in dreams. When you remember. When you can. When it works. It’s that easy.” This does indeed explain our obvious show our love of any stories. Just as the next quote (Martin’s again) explains for me a love of fantasy, “The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real…for a moment at least…that long magic moment before we wake…We read fantasy to find the colors again, to taste strong spices and hear the song the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.” To keep quoting Martin, in a slightly different context, “Knowledge is what man is all about… he also needs mystery, and poetry, and romance… he needs a few unanswered questions to make him brood and wonder” (excerpt2). I could not say either truth much better if I tried.
So we prefer the lies as we edge about the truths. That is why this next line seems so chilling in its veracity, “The truth will set us free. But freedom is cold and empty and frightening, and lies can often be warm and beautiful.” (I could quote much more from this Martin piece, but encourage you instead to read the selection I provided in excerpt3.) We need the lies to dampen the fear, the despair, to give the surviving hope one cannot live without.
The truth that we are alone can be the most frightening of all. Many spend hours trying to connect with their fellow humans, to understand their drives, their beliefs, their reasoning and logic. More still view it as a hopeless attempt but try again and again to bring even one person to support their belief, their view, their story. A countless number argue and debate and hold to their own beliefs like a drowning man in a flood, regardless of whether such a belief is indeed worth it, whether anyone believes them and supports them, or is indeed if it is a logical point of reasoning. For this proof, I need not quote anything; it is a truism in itself. Regardless of where one looks, it holds firm in its verity.
In conclusion, the simple reason we believe, regardless of what we believe in, is to be happy and have a purpose to our lives.
Excerpt from the introduction to Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors:
They do it with mirrors. It’s a cliché, of course, but it’s also true. Magicians have been using mirrors, usually set at a forty-five-degree angle, ever since the Victorians began to manufacture reliable, clear mirrors in quantity, well over a hundred years ago John Nevil Maskelyne began it, in 1862, with a wardrobe that, thanks to a cunningly placed mirror, concealed more than it revealed.
Mirrors are wonderful things. They appear to tell the truth, to reflect life back out at us; but set a mirror correctly and it will lie so convincingly you’ll believe that something has vanished into thin air, that a box filled with doves and flags and spiders is actually empty, that people hidden in the wings or the pit are floating ghosts upon the stage. Angle it right and a mirror becomes magic casement; it can show you anything you can imagine and maybe a few things you can’t.
(The smoke blurs the edges of things.)
Stories are, in one way or another, mirrors. We use them to explain to ourselves how the world works or how it doesn’t work. Like mirrors, stories prepare us for the day to come. They distract us from the things in the darkness.
Fantasy-and all fiction is fantasy of one kind or another-is a mirror. A distorting mirror, to be sure, and a concealing mirror, set at forty-five degrees to reality, but it’s a mirror nonetheless, which we can use to tell ourselves things we might not otherwise see. (Fairy tales, as G.K. Chesterton once said, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.)…
Excerpt from “With Morning comes Mistfall” from George R.R. Martin’s
Dreamsongs Volume 1:
“…Dave Gregor had captained the ship that had discovered Wraithworld, nearly seventy-five years earlier. He had probed through the mists with his sensors, and set his ship down on the seacoast plains. Then he sent teams out to explore.
There were two men in each team, both well armed. But in one case, only a single man came back, and he was in hysteria. He and his partner had gotten separated in the mists, and suddenly he heard a bloodcurdling scream. When he found his friend, he was quite dead. And something was standing over the body.
The survivor described the killer as manlike, eight feet tall, and somehow insubstantial. He claimed that when he fired at it, the blaster bold went right through it. Then the creature had wavered, and vanished in the mists.
Gregor sent other teams out to search for the thing. They recovered the body, but that was all. Without special instruments, it was difficult to find the same place twice in the mists. Let alone something like the creature that had been described.
So the story was never confirmed. But nonetheless, it caused a sensation when Gregor returned to Earth. Another ship was sent to conduct a more thorough search. It found nothing. But one of its search teams disappeared without a trace.
And the legend of the mist wraiths was born…”
***********************
“…There was evidence, I thought. And some of it was hard to deny. But Dubowski was shaking his head vigorously.
“The Gregor affair proves nothing,” he said. “You know as well as I this planet has never been explored thoroughly. Especially the plains area, where Gregor’s ship put down. It was probably some sort of animal that killed that man. A rare animal of some sort native to that area.”
“What about the testimony of his partner?” Sanders asked.
“Hysteria, pure and simple.”
“The other sightings? There have been an awful lot of them. And the witnesses weren’t always hysterical.”
“Proves nothing,” Dubowski said, shaking his head. “Back on Earth, plenty of people still claim to have seen ghosts and flying saucers. And here, with those damned mists, mistakes and hallucinations are naturally even easier.”
*************************
“Because. Because he’s going to destroy this world, if I let him. By the time he and his kind get through, there won’t be a mystery left in the universe.”
“He’s just trying to find some answers. Do the wraiths exist? What about the ruins? Who built them? Didn’t you ever want to know those things, Sanders?”
“Of course,” he said when he had his drink. “Everyone’s wondered about those questions. That’s why people come here to Wraithworld, to the Castle Cloud. Each guy who touches down here is secretly hoping he’ll have an adventure wit the wraiths, and find out all the answers personally.
So he doesn’t. So he slaps on a blaster and wanders around the mist forests for a few days, or a few weeks, and finds nothing. So what? He can come back and search again. The dream is still there, and the romance, and the mystery.
And who knows? Maybe one trip he glimpses a wraith drifting through the mists. Or something he thinks is a wraith. And then he’ll go home happy, ‘cause he’s been part of a legend. He’s touched a little bit of creation that hasn’t had all the awe and wonder ripped from it yet by Dubowski’s sort.
Dubowski! Bah! He makes me boil. He comes here with his ship full of lackeys and his million credit grant and all his gadgets, to hunt for wraiths. Oh, he’ll get them all right. That’s what frightens me. Either he’ll prove they don’t exist, or he’ll find them and they’ll turn out to be some kind of submen or animal or something.
And that will ruin it. Ruin it, you hear! He’ll answer all the questions with his gadgets, and there’ll be nothing left for anyone else. It isn’t fair.”
****************************
There was silence. Then Sanders spoke, but his voice was beaten. “Just one question,” he said softly. “Why?”
That brought Dubowski up short, and his smile faded. “You never have understood, have you, Sanders? It was for truth. To free this planet from ignorance and superstition.”
“Free Wraithworld?” Sanders said. “Was it enslaved?”
“Yes, enslaved by foolish myth. By fear. Now this planet will be free, and open. We can find out the truth behind those ruins now, without murky legends about half-human wraiths to fog the facts. We can open this planet for colonization. People won’t be afraid to come here, and live, and farm. We’ve conquered the fear.”
…”You’re the one who doesn’t understand, Doctor. Don’t kid yourself. You haven’t freed Wraithworld. You’ve destroyed it. You’ve stolen its wraiths, and left an empty planet.”
“I think you’re wrong…but even if you were correct, well, it’s just too bad. Knowledge is what man is all about. People like you have tried to hold back progress since the beginning of time. But they failed, and you failed. Man needs to know.”
“Maybe, but is that the only thing man needs? I don’t think so. I think he also needs mystery, and poetry, and romance. I think he needs a few unanswered questions to make him brood and wonder.”
Excerpt from “The Way of Cross and Dragon” by George R.R. Martin
from Dreamsongs Volume 1:
“I made it all up,” he repeated. He hefted the book fondly. “I drew on many sources, of course, especially the Bible, but I do think of Cross and Dragon as mostly my own work. It’s rather good, don’t you agree? Of course, I could hardly put my name on it, proud as I am of it, but I did include my imprimatur. Did you notice that? It was the closest I dared come to a byline.”
“You startle me,” I admitted. “I expected to find an inventive madman, some poor self-deluded fool, firm in his belief that he had spoken to God. I’ve dealt with such fanatics before. Instead I find a cheerful cynic who has invented a religion for his own profit. I think I prefer the fanatics. You are beneath contempt, Father Lukyan. You will burn in hell for eternity.”
“I doubt it,” Lukyan said, “but you do mistake me, Father Damien. I am no cynic, nor do I profit from my dear Saint Judas. Truthfully, I lived more comfortably as a priest of your own Church. I do this because it is my vocation.”
I sat down. “You confuse me,” I said. “Explain.”
“Now I am going to tell you the truth,” he said. He said it in an odd way, almost a chant. “I am a Liar,” he added.
“You want to confuse me with a child’s paradoxes,” I snapped.
“No, no.” He smiled. “A Liar. With a capital. It is an organization, Father Damien. A religion, you might call it. A great and powerful faith. And I am the smallest part of it.”
“I know of no such church,” I said.
“Oh, no, you wouldn’t. It’s secret. It has to be. You can understand that, can’t you? People don’t like being lied to.”
“I do not like being lied to,” I said.
Lukyan looked wounded. “I told you this would be the truth, didn’t I? When a Liar says that, you can believe him. How else could we trust each other?”
“There are many of you?” I asked. I was starting to think that Lukyan was a madman after all, as fanatical as any heretic, but in a more complex way. Here was a heresy within a heresy, but I recognized my duty: to find the truth of things, and set them right.
“Many of us,” Lukyan said, smiling. “You would be surprised, Father Damien, really you would. But there are some things I dare not tell you.”
“Tell me what you dare, then.”
“Happily,” said Lukyan Judasson. “We Liars, like those of all other religions, have several truths we take on faith. Faith is always required. There are some things that cannot be proven. We believe that life is worth living. That is an article of faith. The purpose of life is to live, to resist death, perhaps to defy entropy.
We also believe that happiness is a good, something to be sought after.”
“The Church does not oppose happiness,” I said drily.
“I wonder,” Lukyan said. “But let us not quibble. Whatever the Church’s position on happiness, it does preach belief in an afterlife, in a supreme being and a complex moral code.”
“True.”
“The Liars believe in no afterlife, no God. We see the universe as it is, Father Damien, and these naked truths are cruel ones. We who believe in life, and treasure it, will die. Afterward there will be nothing, eternal emptiness, blackness, nonexistence. In our living there has been no purpose, no poetry, no meaning. Nor do our deaths possess these qualities. When we are gone, the universe will not long remember us, and shortly it will be as if we never lived at all. Our worlds and our universe will not long outlive us. Ultimately, entropy will consume all, and our puny efforts cannot stay that awful end. It will be gone. It has never been. It has never mattered. The universe itself is doomed, transient, uncaring.”
I slid back in my chair, and a shiver went through me as I listened to poor Lukyan’s dark words. I found myself fingering my crucifix. “A bleak philosophy,” I said, “as well as a false one. I have had that fearful vision myself. I think all of us do, at some point. But it is not so, Father. My faith sustains me against such nihilism. It is a shield against despair.”
“Oh, I know that, my friend, my Knight Inquisitor,” Lukyan said. “I’m glad to see you understand so well. You are almost one of us already.
You’ve touched the heart of it. The truths, the great truths-and most of the lesser ones as well-they are unbearable for most men. We find our shield in faith. Your faith, my faith, any faith. It doesn’t matter, so long as we believe, really and truly believe, in whatever lie we cling to.” He fingered the ragged edges of his great blond beard. “Our psychs have always told us that believers are the happy ones, you know. They may believe in Christ or Buddha or Erika Stormjones, in reincarnation or immortality or nature, in the power of love or the platform of a political faction, but it all comes to the same thing. They believe. They are happy. It is the ones who have seen truth who despair, and kill themselves. The truths are so vast, the faiths so little, so poorly made, so riddled with error and contradiction that we see around them and through them, and then we feel the weight of darkness upon us, and can no longer be happy.”
I am not a slow man. I knew, by then, where Lukyan Judasson was going. “Your Liars invent faiths.”
He smiled. “Of all sorts. Not only religious. Think of it. We know truth for the cruel instrument it is. Beauty is infinitely preferable to truth. We invent beauty. Faiths, political movements, high ideals, belief in love and fellowship. All of them are lies. We tell those lies, among others, endless others. We improve on history and myth and religion, make each more beautiful, better, easier to believe in. Our lies are not perfect, of course. The truths are too big. But perhaps someday we will find one great lie that all humanity can use. Until then, a thousand small lies will do.”
***********
The truth will set us free.
But freedom is cold and empty and frightening, and lies can often be warm and beautiful.