A few months ago, some people broke into my house around 3 in the morning. We were lying in bed, sleeping, breathing, hearing nothing but the noise machine whooshing a constant snowstorm of static.
I heard a loud bump and woke up. The light was on in the kitchen – why? We got up, started to sneak around the rooms, and as this feeling of invasion leaked into consciousness, the house was transformed from mine, an extension of me, into something unfamiliar, other, not me, uncanny.
Freud’s discussion of the experience of the uncanny pointed to the heart of this feeling through the German word unheimlich – meaning un-home-like, unfamiliar, strange – which includes the home within the concept of the un-home-ly. Freud uses the example, in his essay Das Unheimlich, of wandering in the woods in circles; suddenly, you see a cluster of trees you know you’ve seen before, and the repetition is uncanny, because you thought you were somewhere new. My home had become this zone of the uncanny by being invaded and transformed without my knowledge.
We walked unnaturally through the rooms and saw empty places where electronic objects of value had been lying minutes before. Charging cords dangled.
Backpacks, credit cards – all could be replaced except the pencilled writing that had been accumulating in the notebooks that had been lying on my desk. Or the marginal notes in my copy of a beautiful small-form hardcover book that had been lying with them, Sam Harris’s Lying. Why did they take these things?
Would one of the thieves open this book and begin to read? If so, he or she would find these opening sentences:
Among the many paradoxes of human life, this is perhaps the most peculiar and consequential: We often behave in ways that are guaranteed to make us unhappy. Many of us spend our lives marching with open eyes toward remorse, regret, guilt, and disappointment. And nowhere do our injuries seem more casually self-inflicted, or the suffering we create more disproportionate to the needs of the moment, than in the lies we tell to other human beings. Lying is the royal road to chaos.
What follows is a crystalline argument for honesty in all things, at all times. Not blunt or harsh, unfiltered, unkind utterances, but statements that are not untrue. One can still be tactful. But lying, Harris argues, deprecates the receiver of the lie and the speaker. It cuts off the possibility of learning, growth, and change. It is anti-social and causes harm.
Stealing depends on lying: this is mine to take, this is mine now because I hold it in my hand and know the secret number, this is mine to keep, this is mine to sell, the person whom I steal from is nothing, is no one.
Grammatically guilty?
Have you noticed how people avoid the word lie except in the sense of being untruthful? Lie is often replaced with the grammatically incorrect lay – as in “I’m going to lay down” or, famously, “Lay, lady, lay.” The awkwardness arises because lay and lie are different kinds of verbs. Lay is a transitive verb, meaning it needs an object; you lay something down, you lay down the law, but you don’t just lay down. No, you lie down. You lie on the bed. You can lay a blanket on the bed and then lie on it or under it. I believe many commit these linguistic contortions – called solecisms – because no one wants to say, in any form, “you lie” or “I lie.”
A solecism is a grammatical infraction and, according to Merriam-Webster, a “breach of decorum.” But how often do we exaggerate, or tell a “white” lie with no qualms, no sense of infraction, no shame? While you may not be harming grammar when you do, you’re harming yourself and others. And unless you’re a sociopath, if you’re honest with yourself when you lie, you’ll notice the shame. Don’t push it away… look into what it is saying to you.
Amazingly, some of my stolen items that had identifying details turned up – one a few days later in a neighbor’s stolen car, another three months later in someone’s bushes a mile away.
I wonder where the little book called Lying ended up. I hope someone will find it, and read it. It could change their life.
Quote from Sam Harris, Lying, Four Elephants Press, 2013