Truth vs. Fact

“Happeningness is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”
-from “How to Tell a True War Story” by Tim O’Brien

Occasionally we find a way to express how we’re feeling by telling stories. It’s a way to find connection in our lives through the jumble of events and emotions, like a thread that strings our inner beings together. It’s a way to understand what has happened to us and why it happened. It’s a way of comprehending how the puzzle pieces in our lives fit together and allows us to see the full picture that the past, present, and future creates. It gives meaning to our lives.

Pico Iyer writes, “The truth is not the same as facts… I think the writer has to be true to the mystery as well as the clarity of life.” In his essay, “The Khareef,” he narrates a story about his visit to Yemen and his experiences there, and how six weeks later he watched the two airplanes crash into the World Trade Center. The forgotten place where he had been just a month and a half earlier fell underneath the national spotlight. I believe that to comprehend the idea of what Yemen had been like when he had visited six weeks earlier and the idea of the national significance that had been placed on it, Iyer wrote “The Khareef.” It was for his understanding and coming to terms with the past and the present. “Only later, when Yemen was suddenly yanked into the headlines in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks six weeks after my return, did I decide to write another piece, for myself, and arising out of memory and conviction, to come at the area in a deeper way than magazine journalism would allow.”