The Art of Lying.
Chapter 1.
Retirement had, if he was honest with himself, brought about some pleasures he had neither envisaged nor appreciated previously.
It was a whole new ball game. Time; that generally perceived covert robber was to be embraced, and a library of books, accumulated over the years, beckoned suggestively; like lovers for renewed or first-time reckless consummation.
No longer the usage of formal text books to pass exams. Here was the final journey; the chance of one burning glow darting out a shower of brilliant images, leaping in a white-hot spark across gaps unbridgeable by thought, passing through a commonplace leaving it luminous and transparent, melting a group of heterogeneous ideas into a short-lived unity and, then as suddenly as a flame, dying.
It was therefore of no small importance to take the first steps in a controlled manner. He had thought it both prudent and logical to start with the Ancient Greeks. But the more he delved, the more unexpected tangential links led to new destinations.
Then of course came the aspiration to personal creativity, in a barely suppressed desire to use such stimuli and write.
His living room where his books were kept was akin a monk's cloister; with the house being situated in a cul de sac residence that provided comforting seclusion with few visitors.
There was however one cloud that had appeared in his thinking and which mitigated against the desire to write. He really questioned whether you can rob a story of its reality and meaning by making it too true?
It depended, he supposed upon its purpose. A story can be a flight of the imagination, or conversely a rendition of facts. Thus, while the transformation of Dr. Jekyll might read dangerously like an experiment out of “the Lancet”, the lies and spin coming out of the mouths of a number of political figures recently, had elevated them into a realm of fantasy worthy of some of the greatest fictional novels of English literature.
Some of course were only third-rate liars, adept only in the art of concealing what was not worth finding. The press had then subsequently hunted down the obvious, with the enthusiasm of short-sighted detectives; especially if a bit of solicitous dirt was scented from afar. This led, albeit with a modicum of black humour, to a situation where the suspense of the writer had become almost unbearable.
However the crux was that there had, almost imperceptibly arisen, the decay of lying as an art, with science, and social pleasure being responsible for a decline in a modern literature excessively concerned with the representation of facts and social reality.
It begged the question in his mind as to whether life imitated art, or was it more likely the other way around? For it touched upon human behaviour in social situations itself, in that it was becoming more difficult to distinguish whether the laws of etiquette governing polite society, were in fact, a mask, and if tact was merely an elaborate art of impression management?