“You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."

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          The late Professor Michael S. Reynolds, a Hemingway scholar who seemed to metamorphose into the writer along the arduous path of composing five volumes of biography, once told my American Lit' classmates and me, “There is no such thing as truth.” “Cool,” I said to myself, “This dude’s so cool.” He confessed in the same lecture that he was feeling particularly good that evening because his anti-depressants were working. I just wanted to hug the guy! Then, he shared a story from his Hemingway research days when several of his colleagues had convened with him along the Michigan shoreline, an area that acts as the setting for a number of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories. “Adams was right here,” one of them said excitedly. The group apparently nodded in agreement and shared enthusiasm, except Professor Reynolds. “No, my friends,” he contradicted. “What you’re referring to occurs on page forty-nine.”

            When you enter the main library at Georgetown University, the Latin words pictured above greet you. The school is one of several Jesuit universities around the country, and the Jesuits take their truth about as seriously as one can. In fact, the famous protesting priest from the ‘60s, Daniel Berrigan, who co-founded the Plowshares Movement and was on the FBI’s most wanted list with his priest brother, Philip, is a Jesuit, as is Father John Dear, another proud, vocal, and busy peace activist. The Berrigans used civil disobedience, the bullhorn, and the pen to tell the world that the Vietnam War was wrong, and J. Edgar Hoover didn’t like it.

            So, what is this truth that sets you free? Most Christians, I imagine, would say generally that Jesus (as noted by John, 8:32, in the Christian New Testament) refers to the freedom gained by accepting him as one’s savior. The words officially posted over the gateway to the university library, however, must refer to any truth gained from within the bound contents stacked throughout the building, from Marxism to evolution to neuroscience to Balzac. Or maybe knowing truth is like what Supreme Court Justice Stewart famously said about pornography, that he couldn’t define it, but he knew it when he saw it. When I speak with friends of freedom gained from truth, I usually mean hearing what your body, your true self, tells you. If you quake at the thought of some proposed plan for your future, and you know it isn’t simply nervousness but dread, that’s truth. You may not like what that truth means for your future, but eventually, you enjoy the acceptance of it and feel its freedom. The body knows its nature. Then, of course, there’s the Keatsian version of truth, that truth is beauty. And vice versa. And it’s all we need to know.

            It seems Professor Reynolds spoke the truth.

Illustrated Man

In the prologue of Ray Bradbury’s famous collection of stories, The Illustrated Man (1951), a stranger covered in tattoos meets our narrator, a man taking a “walking tour of Wisconsin.” The tattooed man explains that his tattoos predict the future, and that at night, the figures change to reveal at times a violent death ahead for someone the Illustrated man has recently met. In fact, anyone who sits with him long enough will see his or her fate unfold on the man’s skin. And people don’t like it, whatever it is that awaits them. They see themselves and their future in the shifting ink and either flee or demand that the Illustrated man leave immediately.

Bradbury’s painted character addresses the nature of fate, the way things are, a common subject even among the ancients like Sophocles in Oedipus the King (429 BCE) or the Roman Epicurean, Lucretius. But is this the nature of tattoos? Do they tell us who we are or what we will be? Does a butterfly shifting with each stride along the curve of someone’s spine say who that person is? What about a flaming skull burning down that man’s shoulder? A tattoo artist I knew in Raleigh many years ago received classical training in the arts. His work was exceptionally detailed and nuanced, and he refused service to the random fraternity brother who wanted a Yosemite Sam tattoo. I’m not sure if doing that kind of artwork were beneath the artist, or he guessed the brother would regret getting Sam as a permanent mark (pretty sure it was the former), but he had high standards. Another artist I know has ink on both sides of her head, including ancient text along her face. I don’t know her well, but she seems to be a kind, genuine, and wise person. She tells me of moms uttering words of horror when they see her. I imagine maternal arms wrapping and pulling gawking children close to maternal breasts. That tattooed woman must be wicked, I hear them saying.

But hey, I guess that’s just the way things are.