When Timmy began to speak, Meredith was in the habit of calling him “honey,” which the boy took to mean that others were also to be called “honey.”
The mailman frowned at this.
The Walmart cashier, a humorless Texan, squinted at my son with a touch of irritation.
“Bye, honey,” Timmy called over his shoulder.
Timmy, I want you to consider something: George Washington was once declared a terrorist in the halls of Parliament. America’s beloved patriot had become King George’s detested criminal. It is not just beauty that resides in the eye of the beholder.
Also, Timmy, whenever you glance at a five-dollar bill, I want you to remember that Abraham Lincoln engaged in the sexual act. He had four children, after all, and this required ejaculation, and during those exclamatory moments, Lincoln almost certainly was not contemplating the Gettysburg Address. The man on the five-dollar bill is not the whole man.
I want you to bear in mind that truth has no patience for what is tasteful and what is not.
And I want you to ask: Is one-kabillionth of the truth the truth? Is three-quarters of the truth the truth? In fact, is the whole truth, to which we are pledged in courtrooms, ever truly the whole truth, and if so, how do you know? Can you read minds? Were you present at the creation? Does sunlight come equipped with earbuds through which it whispers to you, “I am truth, I am truth”? Do wars whisper, “I am righteous, I am righteous”? Or is it mankind who whispers those comforting words about sunlight and the wars we make?
There is no Easter Bunny, Timmy. Although your mother and I will do all we can to make you believe in generous rabbits, please don’t forget that you once accepted as perfectly true something that was perfectly false.
As you grow older and wiser, I want you to remind yourself that this true-false thing cuts both ways. What is accepted as false may later be accepted as true. And what is accepted as true may later be denounced as false. Planet Earth is not flat. Planet Earth is not located at the center of the universe.
I want you to remember that your country once went to war to get rid of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.
I want you to consider that the witches executed in Salem, Massachusetts, were probably not true witches, except in the heads of the people who executed them.
I want you to remember that the word “truth” can kill.
I want you to remember that what is true in one place may not be true in another. Right now, for example, it’s Christmas Eve, 11:52 p.m., on Friday, December 24, 2004. That’s true, I suppose. But it’s not true in Tokyo, is it? Or in Baghdad? Or on Neptune?
Right now you are sound asleep in your crib, dreaming your true dreams, but at 5 a.m. tomorrow, when you awaken, what is true at this instant will no longer be true.
I want you to remember that truths can be contradictory. I could tell you, Timmy, that you live in a great and good country, and I would be telling the truth. But I could also tell you that ours is a country that once permitted the enslavement of human beings, and that too would be true.
Truth can be fluid, Timmy. People fall in love. People fall out of love. What is true on Thursday may not be true on Friday, or may not be true in exactly the same way.
I want you to remember that Newton was succeeded by Einstein.
I want you to remember that what we call the Vietnam War is called by others the American War.
I want you to remember that God did not receive creation instructions from the authors of Genesis or from the trustees of Oral Roberts University. Presumably the instructional flow went the other way.
I want you to remember that sometimes—in fact, many times—literal truth does not matter in the least, and should not matter. As you sit in a movie theater or lie in bed with a good novel, Timmy, I hope you will not mutter to yourself every few seconds: “That’s not true, that’s not true, that’s not true, that’s not true, that’s not true.” If anything of the sort occurs—if literal truth matters to you that much—please seek counseling.
Along the same lines, I want you to keep in mind that any work of history, though it may contain a great deal of truth, will never contain the truth. The daydreams of Alexander the Great will not appear in a work of history, and yet daydreams influence aspiration, and aspiration influences behavior, and human behavior influences history. Did Tojo wake up with a bad headache on a December morning in 1941? Did Ho Chi Minh dream about riding naked aboard an elephant through the streets of Saigon? At the Little Bighorn, in his final seconds, did Custer appreciate the irony that he was about to receive exactly what he had come prepared to deliver? History doesn’t know.
Also, Timmy, I want you to remember that Osama bin Laden is at this instant convinced of certain truths, truths he considers worth killing for, just as Dick Cheney is convinced of his own precious truths, truths he too believes are worth killing for. Truth does not come dressed in flags or priestly vestments or classy business suits.
I want you to remember that the word “truth,” especially when it’s capitalized, can be used as a tyrant’s bludgeon or as a saint’s exhortation or as a con man’s invitation to invest your life savings in a Ukrainian time-share.
Also, Timmy, I want you to know that your first utterance had nothing to do with Shakespeare. It had nothing to do with murdering people in suspenders and straw boaters. Your first words, in fact, were these: “This so’ is mine!” (The word “so’,” which is not quite a word, was your parents’ shorthand for “soda pop.”) While few will believe it, your grammar was excellent and your youthful utterance arrived in the form of a flawlessly constructed sentence. Who cares if skeptics don’t believe this? As Galileo discovered, people often prefer comfortable falsehoods to uncomfortable truths.
As I sit at your crib, Timmy, and as I jot down these things under the glow of a night-light, I’m caught up in some pretty serious Christmas Eve sentimentality. I’m here beside you, that seems true, but it’s also true that I’m gliding through the silent, snow-softened Christmas Eves of my Minnesota childhood, then to a sad and fearsome Christmas Eve in Quang Ngai Province, then to a Christmas Eve in 1994 when I’d come to the conclusion that for me there would be no more Christmas Eves ever again. How untrue that was. But how true it then seemed.
Humility is not a bad idea, Timmy.
There’s nothing immoral about the word “maybe.” This entire maybe book, like our lives, is full of maybes—all those undiscovered truths, all those forgotten truths, all those unknowable truths—and it’s okay to say “maybe” even when you believe you have access to some self-evident, ironclad, miraculous, and eternal Truth.
It’s also okay to say “I don’t know,” even when you’re cocksure that you do know.
It’s okay to say “It seems” instead of “It is.”
And so, please, watch out for absolutism, Timmy. Chipmunks are absolutists.
An apple a day may not always, or ever, keep the doctor away.
An eye for an eye may end up becoming a million eyes for a million other eyes, and some of those eyes may