Lies that Bind Us

by Andrew Hart

All Cretans are liars, right? But he was a Cretan. So the paradox is that since he was a Cretan, what he says must be a lie, but since he said that all Cretans are liars, it’s actually true, a truth that confirms a lie and vice versa. It’s like a Möbius strip, you know, turning back on itself: lies, truth, lies, truth, lies—”

The manacle is everything in your life that is broken, I think. It’s your job and your loneliness and your stupid impulse to lie, to wreck whatever you have that is good . . .

I knew there were people in the world whose lives were exponentially harder than mine, but I didn’t want to be confronted with the evidence this week. Not while I was on vacation. God, I thought, what awful people we are.

“What was Plato’s myth of the cave?” I said. “Not really a myth, more a metaphor,” said Marcus. “The people who live in the cave and have never been outside see shadows on the walls cast by the sun. Animals and stuff. Because they’ve never been outside they think the shadows are the real thing rather than just, you know, shadows. 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.”

I don’t hate Simon and Melissa for what they did to me. I hate them more for what they did to a Greek family they thought beneath them. I

But that is unhelpful. Whatever the world is, I still have to live in it. We all do. Maybe that’s the truth at the heart of the labyrinth myth—that we’re wandering, lost, always trying to stay one step ahead of our personal monsters, always ready, sword in hand, spooling out Ariadne’s thread in the hope that one day we will make it out in one piece.

nothing puts your life in focus like someone trying to take it from you.