Lana feels

I read volumes about absolute truth, I write essays about truth and its relation to faith and freedom, I fly around truth like a moth around an open flame, and yet faced with a situation in which pages of truth fly to my fingers I pause and flinch and shy away. This is what I hate about the relationship between academia and life. Tillich and Socrates can have their cross-millenia discussions of Truth with a capital T, but what in my life is the point of it? Will it make me feel better to say these things? They're true. They feel true when they march in their steel-tipped boots to the front of my mind and start jumping up and down, demanding release into air and cyberspace and onto paper, but so what? What use truth, when tact and knowing what not to say when have taken me so far? There's that pull, the appeal of those boots, of being unburdened and free of bitten lips and fingernail-printed palms. But I know in the end it will only end in guilt, apologies, forgiveness. In the end we are incapable of pure truth - it would burn us up. But sometimes it's so damn tempting.