Faced with our limitations and fallibility, there’s a temptation to reduce the truth to a technicality. So much of our culture is obsessed with the facts that we struggle to have a robust understanding of what we know about the world and ourselves. Attempting to excise feeling and purpose and grand visions of ourselves in order to get to the very specific factoids that we can poke and prod and measure impoverishes us. A handful of verifiable timestamps and measurements are not adequate to define us and where we are going.
Ironically, the obsession with fact-finding leaves us exposed to unseen bias and susceptible to acting erratically. Without principles, isolated facts do not provide the coherence necessary for rational action. Can our attempts at a coherent explanation be wrong? Without a doubt. But that is not a reason to stop trying. Without a cosmic understanding of ourselves, we do not have the means of ordering ourselves and our actions.
We live in a world of science playing God and what we can detect and confirm carrying the most weight. But in these shallow waters, there is little to compel action.
From this vantage point, fiction is a disturbing enterprise. Many an article has been written dissecting the life and writing of Laura Ingalls Wilder. There is a general fascination with the points of departure between the books and the real life. There is outrage over what has been left out. There is anger at the supposed lies.
We are looking at the wrong goal posts. A detailed, fact-heavy account of a person’s life is not a good story. In By the Shores of Silver Lake, Wilder writes:
The flaming red shirt and the white horse vanished in the blazing golden light.
Laura let out her breath. “Oh, Mary! The snow-white horse and the tall, brown man, with such a black head and a bright red shirt! The brown prairie all around—and they rode right into the sun as it was going down. They’ll go on in the sun around the world.”
Mary thought a moment. Then she said, “Laura, you know he couldn’t ride into the sun. He’s just riding along on the ground like anybody.”
But Laura did not feel that she had told a lie. What she had said was true too. Somehow that moment when the beautiful, free pony and the wild man rode into the sun would last forever.
The truth that fiction conveys is not one of facts. Yet, it is something other than lies, and it feeds souls as mere facts never could.
