And The Truth Shall Set You Free.

An analytic truth is a statement which is true in all possible worlds or under all possible interpretations.


I was young and stupid, and I wanted to please everybody, and I was gifted; I could tell what people wanted to hear, and I always told them what they wanted to hear, and that made them happy, as if it was the only thing that mattered, and I always got what I wanted, which was all that mattered to me.


He was a different story. I could not read him, not because he was difficult, but because there was nothing to read. How do you read a blank paper? How do you read somebody who always tells the truth?

The things he said weren't always nice. I stayed away.

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Truth is persistent. Once it catches a glimpse of you, it never lets you go. I tried to stay away; I really did. I wanted things to go back to normal. I tried to pretend the truth didn't exist, but every corner I turned to, it was there, waiting to find me and torment me. I didn't want it in my life, but the truth left me no choice.

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I was angry at the truth; I was angry at him. It was him who spoke it all the time. It was him who had disturbed the stillness of my life and brought the chaos, and he had to lose, because I wanted him to lose.

But how do you defeat something that is already perfect?

By something equally perfect.

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Truth is ugly and painful, and it leaves scars on your soul that even time cannot heal, but it stands above everything else. It surpasses everything, and in the long run, it is the only thing that matters.

I was defeated, but I was thirsty for more. Truth was like sea water to me. The more I drank, the thirstier I became. I was hurt, but I wanted more.

"Why do you need to know?" He once asked and I knew he didn't mean the question in the book.

"I don't need to eat chocolate, but it makes me happy."

He opened his mouth to say something, stared at my eyes for a moment, then turned around and answered the question in the book.

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The term was over, and everybody was happy. Everybody can tell the truth, but nobody wants to be told the truth. To them, it was a good riddance. To me, it was a great loss.

He was sitting at his desk, putting all the papers in his worn out black bag. He was like a spicy food to me. You eat it, and it burns your tongue and you'll think you'll never want to eat it again, but you wake up the day after, and you want to taste it all over again.

He looked up, stared at my face, looked down on the floor and looked up again.

"If your friend did something wrong, would you tell her so? Would you tell her the truth?"

"Yes," I replied without hesitation. I knew I would.

"So you think you should always tell the truth, and what will be, will be."

"What will be should be."

"What if she's not wrong? What if it's you who's mistaken?"

"The consequences beg to differ." I answered. "You tell the truth all the time. Why shouldn't I?"

He hesitated before answering, "What I tell them is my subjective understanding of reality. I know they always choose what others have defined for them, and I shove their wrongness to their face."

"You think truth is subjective? You think it's constructed?"

"You think truth is absolute?"

I closed my eyes and tried to think. "Maybe it's out there, maybe it's not, and even if it's not, we know how it should be. Why not at least try to get there?"

"Why do you need to know?" He repeated the same old question.

"It makes me happy."

He gave me a sad smile. He looked apologetic, as if he had brought something dreadful in my life. I thought the opposite.

"When you know the truth, it means two things: you'll always be right, and you'll never be happy. You see the world as it is, and you see it as how it should be. You know it'll never be right, and you'll always be miserable. "

"Somebody has to be miserable. Somebody should be upset."

"What you are searching for, you may never find. What you are looking for may not even exist."

"Then we have to make one."

He sighed and gave me a weak smile. I saw pain in his eyes, and I didn't know if it was his or mine reflected in his.

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I'm still young and stupid; I still tell people what they want to hear, but now I have a different reason. Now I know not everybody needs to know the truth, or maybe it's because I, myself, don't know the truth yet.

Somebody once told me 'ignorance is bliss.' No one can argue with that. You don't want to spend your life searching for something you doubt even exists. You don't want to feel this tightness in your chest every time you laugh, but deep down inside, you know you have no other alternative.

Ignorance is bliss, but as Clarence S. Darrow has said it, the pursuit of truth will set you free, even if you never catch up with it.

And I just want to be free.
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