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FORTY-SEVEN

Opposite my desk as I write, two pieces of parchment testify that I am an honorary citizen of Ravello as well as of Los Angeles, and my favorite award: a hammered silver plaque from the cities of Magna Graecia for Creation and my contribution to the classical world. I think the award was presented in Crotone where Pythagoras died. Certainly his cult still haunts the coast which I shall soon be leaving for a more satisfactory world. Yet again.

As I look about my study I see a row of books bound in dark blue leather. Something annoys me. I open Montaigne’s essays in the Screech translation. The source of annoyance is there. But where? Why? The book falls open, automatically, at his essay on Lying which I often reread when faced with the excess of lies in our public life.

Lying is an accursed vice. It is only our words which bind us together and make us human. If we realized the horror and weight of lying we would see that it is more worthy of the stake than other crimes. I find that people normally waste time quite inappropriately punishing children for innocent misdemeanours, tormenting them for thoughtless actions which lead nowhere and leave no trace. It seems to me that the only faults which we should vigorously attack as soon as they arise and start to develop are lying and, a little below that, stubbornness. Those faults grow up with the children. Once let the tongue acquire the habit of lying and it is astonishing how impossible it is to make it give it up…If a lie, like truth, had only one face we could be on better terms, for certainty would be the reverse of what the liar said. But the reverse side of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits. The Pythagoreans make good to be definite and finite; evil they make indefinite and infinite.

A clumsy journalist at Time magazine some years ago did a cover story on me which was odd. It was at the time of Nixon’s fall and since the piece was about my novel 1876 and some of the not always sterling truths that our founders were capable of, the essay on me was entitled “The Sins of the Fathers,” a standard propagandist erasure of news the publisher does not want taken too seriously: sometimes known as “they all do it,” so what’s the fuss? Currently, to counteract all the talk of stolen elections in 2000 and 2004 a dozen journalists now assure us that our elections have always been corrupt; which is hardly true. Recently the same Time magazine journalist felt it was time that I be discredited as vain and self-absorbed. So he wrote as if he had actually been inside my study which he hasn’t and saw hundreds of blue leather-bound books all by me. But they are mostly worn leather-bound reference books of the sort I doubt that this kind of journalist consults. But then more than ever in my lifetime the great whopping lie is seriously in vogue.