What is Truth?

What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

That's how Francis Bacon begins his essay "Of Truth." I had my say about that elsewhere, when I was much younger and didn't really know very much about the truth myself. Although I still think I had a pretty good handle on rhetoric. These days I'm more drawn to the story about the guy in the bar who laments that he's finally drunk enough to know the truth but too drunk to do anything about it. The final blow comes when he wakes up the next morning and can't even remember what it was.

Truth's such an elusive thing. I sometimes think we spend our whole lives trying to find out what it really is, only to discover when it's much too late that either we can't remember what it is or whether we found it or not. As I've aged I've become more and more convinced that most truth is personal. We all cling to the truths we can live with.

I'm not thinking about facts, the sort of things you can look up online or in your bank statements. Nor am I thinking about large philosophical truths, or theological ones either. Nor am I'm thinking about those homely truths we live with every day in situations where we accept what we're told and expect the same acceptance from others, despite the fact that we know the reliability of our instruments is far inferior to that of weathermen.

I'm thinking of the truths we construct about ourselves. What was it Robert Burns said: "Oh wad some power the giftie gie us / To see oursel's as others see us!" But such insight requires a lifetime of study supplemented by good quantities of Scotch whisky. I'm not there yet, but I'm working on it.