1187. “What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer”
Bacon, “Of Truth”
The shock of mild surprise that begins Bacon’s essay carries with it a peculiar intimation: truth may require our care not only because it is important, but also because it may appear quite unimportant. It may be quiet and easily dismissed, like a shy guest or a slow talker, puzzled and out of place. The power of truth may reveal its luster only by the solicitous regard that earns the confidence of those who are accustomed to being snubbed; the power of truth may make itself heard only by a subtle compassion that knows how to draw out those who have been quieted by quicker tongues; the patience that discovers the truth may not be far from the patience that knows how to encourage people who are reluctant to answer a question the first time it is asked.
Sometimes you need to ask the question again, in another way.
Note: On epistemology as ethos, see L. Daston and P. Galison, Objectivity.
It was the first time I saw my mother cry. She’s not the crying type, and it’s no wonder that the sight of her in tears would mark an epoch in my brief life. There is nothing I like better than talking about my mother, all about my mother, but she doesn’t like it much when I do. This is because my mother is opposed to people sitting around talking about themselves, and in her book, this would include members of their immediate family, just as she is opposed to air-conditioning, concentrated wealth, other people doing your laundry, most cosmetics, long sentences, “high hat” easterners, graven images, extravagance, the lifestyles of the rich and the famous, vanity, and my megalomania (as opposed to her own, to which she is quite attached). My mother has always operated as a virtual branch of the government in my mind, an institution as stable as a state apparatus, complete with its own self-aggrandizing legends and language. Her every written message to me ends with “Love, Mother”—as in “Read this. I like this guy. He is objective [meaning the writer she so commends enjoys the indescribable epistemological felicity of being in accord with my mom’s own views]. Love, Mother.”
So my mom is not the sort of person easily shaken up, and the sight of seeing her so must have made its mark on me; the sight of her striding with curt ceremony to meet me in the front yard as I walked home from kindergarten; the sight of her, so young then, her eyes stern and full of tears, trying to give herself some sense of purpose, like the way wounded girls wind up addressing their pain by talking to their dolls. And she said to me, in her severest civic lesson tone, in front of the shrubbery she had planted: Jeff, I want you to remember this day for the rest of your life. The president of the United States was killed today. We joke about it now: it’s one of our more settled, I suppose sacred, routines: Of course I remember, Ma. And do you know why I remember?—because you told me to. We joke about it now, but it was no joke on November 22, 1963; not where I lived: on November 22, 1963, the house where I lived was a house of sorrow.
Now I’m pretty sure I know as much as most people about the crimes, cardinal and venal, of Kennedy and his cadre, not to mention his class—but I’m also pretty sure that none of that diminishes the something serious that by my count began to get lost when the mourning for him passed. And I’m sure that I appreciate the suspicion that surrounds the various campaigns to get us to make all kinds of investments in the Mighty and the Glamorous—let us now praise famous men—but I’ll go to my grave believing that whatever grounds I’ve got for a social conscience were put down one morning in late fall, when a young woman—practically a child herself then, by my long calculations now—came outside to tell her son that the Prince had been murdered in Dallas. And I have to wonder what is gained by way of political education for the children of my class, that would be the middle class, now that the very idea of a Res Publica, a public sphere, is such a faint thought or bad joke; now that the loss of a leader barely makes it through a news cycle, never mind rating as a Day of Awe. I mean, really, do the nameless thousands “dying thus around us everyday” from poverty, hate, and greed get better exposure now that we’ve forgotten what it feels like to have our mothers appear amongst the rhododendrons, summoning us to a national grief?
I think not.
Note: November 22, 1963.