Of Giving the Lie

Some have asked me — and I have asked myself — why a man in good health and full possession of his faculties would choose to spend his time painting his own portrait in words. It is a fair question. The world does not lack for portraits of greater men, painted by better hands. But those portraits are of the public face, which is always arranged for the painter. What I am trying to do is catch the face that arranges itself when no one is supposed to be looking, including its owner — and that face, however plain, is the one I find most interesting to study.

The reason this matters has to do with honesty, which I consider the first of virtues and the one most generally neglected. To lie is not only to deceive another — it is to fracture something in oneself, to introduce a crack into the relation between the inner man and the outer. A small lie is a small crack; a habit of lying is a wall that eventually has nothing behind it. I have known men who lied so consistently and so long that they could no longer be certain what they truly believed, because every belief had at some point been dressed in false clothing and the original was mislaid. The liar’s worst punishment is not to be found out by others but to lose the thread of himself.

To call a man a liar is to tell him that he is a coward toward God and toward the world — for the lie is an offense against both.

This book is my attempt to stay honest. Not honest in the sense of confessing everything — I have my reserves and my silences like anyone — but honest in the sense of not pretending to be otherwise than I am. When I say I am vain, I am vain. When I say I am sometimes afraid, I am sometimes afraid. When I say my opinions shift, they shift. The book is the record of an ongoing accounting with myself, and the accounting must be accurate or it is nothing. I owe this to myself more than to any reader.