Suspension of Disbelief, or The Agreed-Upon Lie
Now I’m going to tell you a story, and you know I made it up, because
the cover of my book contains the words, “A Novel.” So, right at the start you,
reader, accept the fact of the lie. You will be told lies and you agree to
suspend your disbelief for the course of the book and live in a world of lies.
Thornton Wilder used this phrase—“the agreed-upon lie”—to describe the
relationship between actors and audience at a play. The houselights dim, the
ushers move to the back of the auditorium, the crowd noise abates, slowly
hushes, finally ceases, as the spectators relax and enter into the agreed-upon
lie.
“Sit back and relax, enjoy the flight,” says the pilot on the intercom to
the airline passengers. He’s lying too, he’s telling you there’s nothing to
worry about while you are suspended for three hours in the absolutely unreal
and terrifying thing of flying through space and time.
But then, much of human life is based upon agreed-upon lies. We lie to
our nearest and dearest—sometimes the lies are utterly cruel and deceitful,
sometimes they are ameliorative, white lies—but we lie all the time. And, on a
daily basis, perpetually and over the course of a long lifetime, we tell lies
to our very selves. It’s a survival mechanism, developed over eons of years of
evolution. We must lie to ourselves in order to survive.
[excerpted from the book Here We Be. Where Be We?]
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