Poverty will not make [a person] worthless—[they] may be worth a great deal more when they are poor than when they were rich; but dishonesty goes very far indeed to make a person of no value—a thing to be thrown out in the dust-hole of the creation… –from The Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald
…I don’t quite agree, of course. No amount of dishonesty turns a person into a “thing.” No person should be thrown out. But. Dishonesty is a force that destroys. We hurt others a little and hurt ourselves a lot. We degrade our value.
The Internet is not set up to be an honest place. The more time we spend here the more we leverage our meaningfulness on a crumbling, dishonest fulcrum.
Anything we post on the Internet has an element of dishonesty, including this post. We do not portray ourselves in an image or an email; we portray the self that we think will do well. Our tweets attract or distract, they do not describe. Instead of mentorship we get celebrity. Instead of love we get pornography. Instead of fruit we get sugar.
When I’m writing, I think it is a quest for honesty. To surface internal truths, however adorned, and respect them. In company we are someone else’s story. Writing alone, we are the audience, the stage, the lights, the curtain.
Hemingway invented the “write one true sentence” advice, I think. This often results in the silence of windless desert. Carlo Rovelli suggests everything is a series of relationships to other things, and when alone, there’s a lot of silence at first. But also an opportunity.
I don’t lie aloud, that I can tell. And I think a chosen smile is not a lie, but merely one half of a story. I need to watch myself for fictions that prune reality. The desire to squeeze the landscape comes from fear, not desire. To be loved. To be safe. But I want my truth to be loved, not the squeeze.
I think honesty is waiting for us, ever ready, hung on our belt.