The Three Truths

Things that are unequivocally, indubitably, stuuningly true are hard to come by. It takes someone like King Arthur to come up with three of them.

So this is the story. King Arthur is out hunting in the woods by himself. As literary scholars, we immediately recognize the woods as the realm of chance and disorder, so it’s no wonder that he stumbles upon the hugest, most monstrously ugly troll imaginable. The troll seizes him by the neck -- imagine poor Arthur’s feet kicking fruitlessly in the air as the troll hoists him up. The troll is about to throttle him and have king for snack, but he makes him one last offer: if Arthur can come up with three truths, the troll will let him go. Truths are so rare and valuable, you see, that you must never pass up the chance to hear some. Of course Arthur, being a great king of legend, knows more about truth than your average forest-wanderer.

“First,” says Arthur, thinking fast, “you are the ugliest person I have ever seen.”

“Hmm,” says the troll. “Yes, that’s definitely true.”

“Second, “ says Arthur, “if I had known you were out here, I would never have come this way.”

“Yes,” concedes the troll, “definitely true again.”

“Last,” says Arthur, “if you let me go, I will never come back!”

“True!” says the troll admiringly. “So, so true!” And he lets Arthur go, and Arthur skedaddles back to Camelot, never to return.

This by way of the renowned folklorist Archer Taylor.* Taylor’s other articles include “And Marie Antoinette Said...”, “’Which Bird Would You Choose to Be?’ -- A Medieval Tale,” and “Raw Head and Bloody Bones.” You can see he got all the good stuff. But the story of the three truths is found in many other contexts, asked of miscreants who cleverly avoid hanging and all sorts of wags. You get a related version in the story of the person called to answer questions before a king. The king threatens to behead the person if he can’t answer the questions, so the poor victim often pursuades someone like his brother to take his place. Then the king asks some standard impossible wisdom-riddles, such as “How deep is the sea?” (Answer: a stone’s throw.) In the final question, the king generally asks, “What am I thinking?” Answer: “You think I’m so-and-so, but actually I’m his brother.” And then one of them gets to marry the princess after all.

So I’ve been thinking about things that are unequivocally, indubitably, stunningly true. Although they’re hard to come by in the folktales, some of them occur to me on a daily basis in actual life. These are the ones that have been occurring to me lately:

1. All of life consists of moving things -- papers, possessions, money, knowledge -- from one place to another.
2. As Leonard Cohen once said, “Everyone lives the life of the heart.”
3. The only way to insure that you can find both the storage container and its lid is to store the container with the lid on. You cannot store them separately and find the right lid.

Now if I can just find my way back to Camelot.

*Archer Taylor, “King Arthur and the Tale of the Three Truths,” Romance Philology 17 (1964), 586-95.