Lies
Killing Us Softly
Lies come in
so many guises
from the bold
to the
so, so sublime
At heart, the lie is an untruth.
An untruth is a deliberate (or not so deliberate) deviation from what actually took place, what was done, what was thought, what was felt, what was hoped or intended.
She told him that she had missed him. He, lovestruck, lapped this up: hook and line and sinker and rod and all the fish in the sea.
But while she, on some insignificant level, had missed him (perhaps his jokes, perhaps the sex, perhaps some other aspect of what made him tick), she knew (or didn’t) as she said it that this missing was embellished, said to pacify, to assure. To make him feel not bad. To make sure he didn’t suspect her cooling, internal climate. She wasn’t ready to break anything off, not just yet, for she still felt that glow—though no longer the fire.
And she was a kind person. She did not want to hurt anyone, least of all her boyfriend of four, going on five months now. She thought him nice, she thought him kind, and she thought him undeserving of pain. So, she fiddled a little with the truth. Tweaked it a bit in his favor.
She lied.
Telling him that she had not missed him would have been the lesser lie, but a lie nonetheless.
::
“Will I be able to move my current directory to this new phone?” asked the customer/potential buyer. “Will it migrate across without problems?”
“Oh, absolutely. Definitely,” lied the salesman who knew (for this issue had been discussed among the sales staff) that the buyer’s personal phone directory, that particular release—while it could be imported, sort of—would still have to more or less be rebuilt from scratch; in fact, it would be faster to just type it all back in anew, a chore to be sure if you had two or three hundred contacts. But the philosophy among the sales staff was “Promise them anything, then sort things out after the close.” Their company had made it almost legally impossible to back out of a sale, and most customers while they did not necessarily return, eventually gave up and accepted the situation. That said, the phone was not a bad phone, it was certainly better than the older versions, but the directory (a software engineering oversight slash blunder) could not migrate, not easily.
This, the salesman saw as a white (or at most a light gray) lie for the customer would end up with a better phone and would eventually (after rebuilding his directory) be very happy with its performance, especially the much-improved camera. Still, white lie, gray lie, black lie, lie of convenience, lie of necessity, nonetheless:
A lie.
::
The classic good lie is the “No” when asked by the Gestapo whether you are sheltering any Juden, when in fact six lived in the hidden basement and another four in the hard-to-access attic.
What do we make out of this lie?
Karma looks kindly upon it.
Black-and-White look unkindly upon it.
::
The teacher looked out at the small lake of upturned faces and asked: “Is it possible to always tell the whole truth?”
No takers.
::
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