Second opinion

`WHAT is truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer' — which is just as well, because no one would have given it him anyway. Man loves truth as worms love garden spades.

These days even (or especially) the truth is libellous, for example when put in references about former employees. Last week, a man discharged from his last post because he was repeatedly drunk at work told me that his ex- employers had not been able to mention his alcoholism in his reference.

`Why not?' I asked.

`It'd be libellous.'

`But you are an alcoholic,' I said.

`Yes, I know, but it'd still be libel.'

As T.S. Eliot once remarked, en pas- sant, humankind cannot bear very much reality; but its tolerance seems to have declined of late, and now it can't bear to hear anything ill of itself without recourse to law.

The avoidance of truth, indeed, is the great goal of humanity, or a large part of it. Also last week, I was sent an airline pilot who was suspected of 'abusing psy- choactive substances'. I don't want to alarm airline passengers unduly — after all, by air is still much the safest way to travel — but there seemed to be some reason to suspect him of sedating and revivifying himself by artificial means.

He had been warned that I should want to take a specimen of his hair for analysis — the said psychoactive sub- stances leaving a chemical deposit there- in. The time came for his haircut at my hands, and I admired his luxuriant hair. I snipped a switch with my little scissors (as close to the scalp as possible) and laid it on the special tinfoil for despatch to the laboratory.

A few days later I received a call from Analhair Laboratories.

`You know Captain L. whose sample you sent us?' asked a technician. 'Are you sure it was his hair you sent us?'

`Yes,' I replied. 'Why?'

`You see,' said the technician, 'it's not human hair.'

`Oh,' I said. There seemed to be two explanations: either Captain L. wasn't human, or he was wearing a wig.

`In fact, it isn't hair at all. We tried boiling it for hours, but it just wouldn't digest, Then we tried the ultimate test.'

`What's that?' I asked, `We set fire to it, to see if it smelt like hair.'

`And did it?'

`It wouldn't bum at all, it wasn't even nylon.'

I should not like to give the impression that no one is ever reliable or truthful, however. Only last week a patient — in this case a prisoner — cleaved close to that elusive entity called the truth, over the nature of which philosophers have been squabbling ever since Man first learnt to think, talk and therefore to lie.

The prisoner had set fire to some paper in his cell, and though the resul- tant fire had been quickly extinguished, his conduct was considered dangerous and possibly the result of madness.

`Why did you burn the paper?' I asked. `I was bored.'

He stared at me with his piercing, vacant blue eyes, the windows of his soul.

`Would you like to be burnt to death just because someone was a little bored?' I asked.

`No,' he replied.

`And would you light another fire?' `No.'

`Why not?' I asked.

`I ain't got no more matches.'

Theodore Dalrymple