On Lyin'

I sort of love lies. And I really love hearing someone cunningly admit that they intend to "lie up a nation". This liking of lies is a relatively recent developement that came via another novel I read this past summer. I tend to fall into epiphanic episodes frequently, and I think, for myself at least, an indicator of a good read is whether it has the power to induce epiphany. Anyways, this summer I engaged in a little soul-searching, and part of it was this realization that I am a liar, and that I would sometimes scare myself because I would lie so naturally. These weren't lies out of malicious intent (as a footnote, I'm not some sort of compulsive liar, but I have lent myself to embellishments/dramatizing from time to time). This coming- to- terms with myself induced a lot of shame. At the same time, I was reading this book- "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith- just for a summer, leisure read. Some themes in the book ended up coinciding so perfectly with the self-evaluation I was conducting at the time. The girl who the story centers around was guilty of the same lying I was beating myself up about. This one passage cleared up a lot of negative feelings I was having and really changed my perspective. In a conversation with the girl's teacher, she is taught the difference between a lie and a story. "A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was; you told it like you thought it should have been". I felt such a sense of relief reading that passage! There's a difference between lieing and story-telling. The girl, Francie, experienced relief at this explanation of things as well. We are, like Francie, "given to exaggerating things. She did not report happenings truthfully, but gave them color, excitement, and dramatic twists...Francie just couldn't tell the plain undecorated truth. She had to put something to it..." Now doesn't that sound perfectly innocent, something to be encouraged, even? And it gave me such an appreciation for the type of lying that is story-telling, and is our imagination at work, and is nothing to be ashamed of.
So let the "lyin go on"! Stories are the way we make sense of things, "lyin" is a manifestation of that "motive for metaphor": our creative attempts to connect with reality.