The difficulty of getting at the truth

[Louie Crew <lcrew@andromeda.rutgers.edu>]

You are very kind.  I regret that going for that one example I deflected
attention from your main point.   Discourse is so damn difficult that at
times I dispair.  Most of us can easily argue any "side", but argument
rarely gets at the truth.  Careful and sparse description sometimes fares
no better either.

I am reading Hemmingway's MOVEABLE FEAST. a nonfiction account of his life
in Paris.  He stressed that it is important as a writer to begin by
writing "one true sentence."  Truth for him seems to demand tha he become
a higher and higher grade of camera, to see without prejudice.

In a section where he writes about homosexuals, he fails miserably.   He
has no access to their inner life,  In trying to account for male
homosexual acquaintances in the artist community of Paris, he barely goes
beyond his boyhood fantasy of taking a knife to fend off homoexual
advances when traveling with hobos.   He feels he's cool for hanging out
with Gertrude Stein and "her friend," but hasn't a clue about the
similarities of his marriage and the marriage of Gertrude and Alice.  
They won't let him into that world, yet he stupidly thinks he  is telling
the truth about it by clear sentences about what he sees.

Louie