Beautiful Truths

I Died for Beauty, Emily Dickinson,

“I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth - the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a-night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.”

           

We are told not to question the way of things.  ‘Curiosity killed the cat,’ and ‘ignorance is bliss,’ are common anecdotes. Yet, as Emily Dickinson  wrote, of truth and often, the truth—once learned—is wished to be forgotten again.  The more unpleasant truths we learn, the more we long for the return of childhood oblivion, where sorrow meant the end of a cookie, and the only struggle was to obtain another; or at least that is how we—in our current state—idealize it.

It seems that whatever state we are in—rich, poor, young, old, employed, jobless, etc.—is the worst possible state, and that our lives would be perfect if just that one thing—whatever it may be—were different.  Once we get that thing—the one that will bring life to perfection—we find it absolutely thrilling…for all of five minutes.  Then the cycle begins again.

It seems that we will always choose to believe that if our luck would only change, all would be right with the world; rather than take responsibility for our lives in full.  We would rather delude ourselves into thinking that our happiness would be complete if only (fill in the blank) than see the truth that everything has both pros and cons in equal measure, and the only question is which ones.  It’s quite understandable, if we were to acknowledge that, then we would be forced to stop denying the attainability of perfection, and that would be a hard thing indeed.  As Carl Schurz said, “Ideals are like the stars: we never reach them, but like the mariners of the sea, we chart our course by them.”

It is a hard thing to know that we will never reach the stars, and yet truth is beauty, and aren’t ideals beautiful?