Truth and Lies

In the 19th Century, humanity lived in a reliable universe, where our senses could be trusted to perceive the outer world. Although poets and artists spoke to the depths of the soul, the bourgeois individual could often convince herself that she knew who she was because she knew what she thought and believed in. I'm thinking about the sort of people one encounters in A Forsythe Saga or even in Buddenbrooks. A person might find himself conflicted or unsure about this or that, but once he had decided which course to follow or which party to endorse, he regained his sense of certainty. If a sense of mystery intruded, it could be stuffed back into the Sunday morning interlude where mystery belonged. Life in this world could be explained by science and reason, which would one day presumably understand everything. At the turn of the previous century there was even talk among physicists of approaching “the end of physics,” a time when the laws of the universe would all be known. (Then Rutherford discovered the nucleus of the atom, and suddenly we were living in a brand-new universe.)

Little more than 100 years later, we live in a very different world. Science has become a great system of theories and no longer seeks eternal Laws. Instead of those reliable atoms — solid bits of matter so small they could be reduced no further — we are now surrounded by muons and quarks with names like “strange” or “charm,” particles enveloped in eternal uncertainty. And we ourselves have become as unknowable and unpredictable as electrons. Now we are in the world of Virginia Woolf, and I have become a verb instead of a noun, an always-shifting consciousness carrying me from one perspective to another in a disorienting fashion. I love my daughter but discover that I envy her, too. I am ambitious for success, but my therapist or my friend or my husband points out to me the ways that I am undermining myself at every turn. I meditate on St. Francis's Prayer, determined to sow love and kindness i