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Some feel that our sense of truth lacks awe, which is never entirely lacking in sensations of beauty. That we are too quick to use truth, to reduce it to the status of a tool or a weapon; that we humanize it, subject it facilely to our will. That in this way we are losing half the value of truth, which is joy in its revelation. And that therefore when we laugh at Keats's lines, it is only because we have been quick to impoverish our truths, demean them or make them slaves, deface and violate their beauty. And in a way, we therefore feel guilty about all the truths we know, the truths we have extracted from the world and from ourselves; and when we realize that we use those truths to further only our own aims, we feel doubly guilty. The most beautiful truth in the world might be hard pressed to defend itself against such an attack.  | So we convince ourselves that truth - the facts that we have accumulated, in many cases created (truths of history, of culture, of social and political life), and many of which we have used to create a world that serves us - that truth is, among other things, no beauty at all, and never has been: truth is hard, the world brutal and cold, life bleakly unfair and unjust, and, of love, only the tough survive. For a time. And all that, of course, is so. Isn't it? The third part of this essay will appear in the next issue. Author bio and RTF download on following page.  | |||
