Nothing At All Like A Voyage, Nothing At All Like A Journey

Your ideals are invisible clouds

So try not to suffocate the poor,

the peasants, with your sympathies.

They know that you’re staring at them.

—Jim Harrison, from “Easter Morning”

Dance on, you pigs, what concern is it of mine?

—Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1914

Could any of this possibly be true, these things you tell us?

No, please understand, they could not possibly be true. They could not be further from the truth.

Where is Further From The Truth? Does such a place, in fact, exist?

Yes, there is in fact such a place, and you might be surprised to learn that it is not nearly so far away as you perhaps imagine. I have myself been there many times.

You have made the voyage?

It is not a voyage, nothing at all like a voyage.

You have made the journey, then?

It is not a journey, nothing at all like a journey.

Would you at least say that when you have visited Further From The Truth it involved a trip of some sort?

I would say that it involved a short drive; I’ve even walked there on occasion. The original watertower still retains a faint trace of the town’s name, but these days people are free to call the place whatever they like, as befits a community founded by liars. Most of the natives are completely indifferent. They couldn’t care less, which is the name, by the way, of one of the suburbs of Further From The Truth.

What name is that?

Couldn’t Care Less. When Further From The Truth became such a teeming Mecca for every sort of liar and fraud, many of the residents started to move out into new suburban developments and sub-divisions, where they were free to cultivate the indifference made possible by their great fortunes, every one of which had been acquired through careers of appallingly successful deceit. The people there, it is said, are among the laziest and most contented on the entire planet.