The hedgehog and the hatchet

  The hedgehog and the hatchet 

Where I am in the book* is at the incident of the hedgehog and the hatchet – where Kolya brings the creature as a gift to the Prince from Aglaya. And he announces, Kolya does, “with impressive authority” that “The plain fact is that she's in love with you, Prince, and that's all there is to it!”
     with impressive authority, when he has in the matter no authority at all. No one does, not even the principles, the Prince or Aglaya, because no one has a clue. There is no predicting where their relationship is going, and there can be no authority where there is no predictability: there are no rules anyone can apply. Everyone is just guessing. Kolya may be guessing right, but that doesn't lend him any authority. A lucky guess is no more than a lucky guess; it doesn’t signal any sort of prescience or any competence at all in the matter.
     But we are all Kolya when we are certain about matters about which there can be no certainty. For instance, the future.

Fyodor’s in Cleveland, where
a post-Cleveland Browns game brawl
allegedly saved the world, 1956.

About the past we are all fabulists. We know that about ourselves, yet, for the most part, we take the stories other people tell us about themselves as the truth. We don’t even stop to think that at least they are abbreviating the truth – because we know that it would take more than a day to tell the whole truth about what happened in a quarter of an hour. We know that the promise to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” is so much folderol if not bullshit. It doesn’t matter how intelligent and clever the oath-taker is or how dumb and sincere. Besides which the court specifically doesn’t want to hear the whole truth. Not only doesn’t it have time for it, it doesn’t allow it; the witness is not allowed to answer more than the question asked; he cannot say, “Yes, but ... ” “The answer to the question you are asking is ‘yes,’ but it’s not the right question, is it? – not if you’re trying to get to the truth, or even a reasonable approximation of it. But you’re not, are you?”
 

We are all fabulists, but we are also gullible. What we take to be the truth, not only in court but in conversation, is a tissue of lies of omission, at best! But also lies of exaggeration because we are always seeking to fill in what we have to leave out by making more vivid what little we can say.
     Exaggeration is actually the commonest form of lying. If you don't believe this, watch a football game with one eye and listen to the play-byplay and commentary with the other ear. What do you see? – a ruction of steroid-stuffed jacksanapes beetling about trying to start a bar fight; and what you hear is that the future of the planet is at stake, but these bravest of men have come out to save it; only these wondrous heroes can save us all.

Roz looks in and sees me at the keyboard. “Whatcha writing?” she says.
     “Lies,” I say. “Just more lies.”
                                                                                  03.22.22 
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* Dostoevsky's The Idiot.  Continued from here.