Lies that Bind Us

by Andrew Hart

But then that’s how you get by sometimes, isn’t it? By deploying those little half-truths that keep the world rosy enough to live in.

Lying is making things up out of thin air. Except that the air is toxic, corrupting everyone who hears the lie, and the liar most of all.

“Icarus is . . . I don’t know: aspiration and daring but also arrogance and hubris. It’s a cool story, the boy who flew too close to the sun so that the wax holding the feathers in his wings melted, but it’s also a great tragic metaphor for overreach, not knowing your limitations.”

We don’t need to look to mythological creatures to find terror and brutality. People can do that all by themselves.

it was the kind of beauty that felt hard and primal, a beauty in which people are irrelevant and unwelcome.

Plato thought life was like that. That all we saw were shadows, but that the real things—the ideal forms of them—existed somewhere else.”

the obsessive care and attention that feels so proprietary, so consuming, the families so ready to circle the wagons and point their guns and knives at whoever is outside the limits of their love,

Strange that love can turn so poisonous, so corrosively selfish.

I hate them for what they showed the world to be.