Truth is weirder than satire…
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Loading... - Tibayan Luntian
- 14 Feb 2023
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As I recall, the exact words were: ‘Shoot these bitches in the head one by one, facing each other’
As with so many famous one-liners, Mark Twain usually gets all the credit for the aphorism, ‘Truth is stranger than fiction’. (And fair enough: he did, after all, write those exact words in 1897).
But it was actually Lord Byron who had first uttered them around 70 years earlier, in Canto 14 of ‘Don Juan’: “‘Tis strange – but true; for truth is always strange, / Stranger than fiction…”
Nonetheless: at the risk of being disowned by my father – who, as some of you may know, subscribes to the view that: ‘Nobody does it better than Byron!’ - I’m going to go with the Mark Twain version, for this article.
Because unlike the great British Romantic poet: Twain also explains exactly WHY reality is sometimes so decidedly ‘unreal’. What he actually wrote was: “Truth is stranger than fiction, […] because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
He was quite right, you know. Consider, for instance, the following story (which headlined yesterday’s news all over the world):
‘Harry and Meghan’s California town ordered to evacuate over… mudslide fears!’ (I kid you not.)
I mean, how’s that for ‘life imitating art’? Honestly, though: if that were the synopsis of a fictionalised novel, based on the recent ‘Harry and Meghan’ debacle (with all its ‘mudslinging’, ‘muck-raking’ associations)… and the author actually chose to end it with Harry and Megan’s entire adoptive town, being literally ‘swept away by a cataclysmic deluge’ (and a MUDSLIDE, of all implausibly-appropriate things…) Read More…
