My headline is only part of a quote. The whole quote goes like this: "Why do beautiful songs make you sad? 'Because they aren't true.' "Never?" 'Nothing is beautiful and true.'" That long-winded insight is by Jonathan Safran Foer. Foer has written three or four books, none of which I have read. I've thought about his quote, though, and I have to admit that I have no clue on whether he is right or not. I suspect he isn't. My reasoning is this: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Something that I find beautiful, isn't necessarily beautiful to everyone. Thus, everything has the potential to be beautiful to someone. His statement lacks context, thus for it to be true, then nothing could be true. I find that a little too hard to believe. There is truth. Unfortunately, just like beauty, truth can also be in the eye of the beholder. What is "true" to me, isn't necessarily true to you. On any given matter, very few people really know the truth. Even when we witness an event, very few of us actually know if what we have seen is true. What I see when I witness something, isn't necessarily what the guy next to me sees. In fact, if someone asks us a direct question about what we saw, both of us can be swayed by what was asked. For instance, although I may have witnessed a car crash, my focus may have been on the pretty woman in the passenger seat at the time of the accident rather than on the cars. The crash would then likely have come as a complete surprise to me. While I witnessed the crash, I really wouldn't know the truth of the matter...other than there was a pretty woman in the passenger seat! I could then easily tell the police that I saw the whole thing and that the driver was at fault (my inference), yet that may not be the truth, And no one would know that it was an inference...except me. The guy next to me, may infer the same thing...even though he was checking out the girl too. In the end, none of us know what is really true. All we can do is follow our beliefs. If a beautiful song makes you sad, it doesn't have to be that it is a lie. It could be that the situation just never happened to you. In the end, there is a lot of beauty in the world. There is also a lot of truth. We all just don't recognize everything the same way. My truths, are true to me. Yours to you. I have heard beautiful stories that I have thought were true. But who really knows the truth of the matter. In the end, we will believe what we want to believe...And that's the truth!
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