February 24
For one face — Helen's — a war of ten years broke upon them. Cities sank, heroes fell, mothers wept on the wall. So dearly do people pay for an image they carry in their hearts and call reality.
Iliad (freely rendered)
Listening mode
For one face — Helen's — a war of ten years broke upon them. Cities sank, heroes fell, mothers wept on the wall. So dearly do people pay for an image they carry in their hearts and call reality.
The longer you hold on to an idea, the harder it becomes to test whether it is true. That is not only a matter of habit. Over time, things come to hang on it that you did or left undone because of it: a move, a contact you broke off, years in which you worked towards something.
A doubt about the idea then seems to call all of that into question too. That is why you may defend it more fiercely than it deserves. Not because it still convinces you, but because its collapse would retroactively devalue something.
In the process, a distinction blurs. What you gave for an image was real. The effort, the sacrifice, even the nights you spent thinking about it, all happened, whether the image was true or not. To have been, they do not depend on its having been true.
That does not make revising it easy. Perhaps you will have to admit a mistake in front of people who saw it early on. But once your whole past is no longer at stake, only the image itself remains to be examined. It is often smaller than the effort suggested.
