What is true

"Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said.

'One can't believe impossible things.'

'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen.

'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day.

Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

• — •

Personally, I think it's unwise and perhaps even a little arrogant to think we can know everything, explain everything, figure out everything. I love the idea that there are things we don't yet understand or cannot fully explain. Those 'keep you guessing' and disquieting things we might openly deride but secretly wish might be true. There is so much mankind continues to discover every minute of every day: individually and collectively, personally and publicly, scientifically and spiritually. Galileo, Newton, Pythagoras, and all those renegades who turned what was thought to be true on end and pitched ideas that flew in the face of what everyone KNEW, are proof that at any given time we don't (and can't) know everything.  Not really. And to pretend we do is in bad taste. The pieces on the board keep shifting with each new fact that's proven, disproven or unearthed. It's said that 'science builds its understanding cumulatively — so that it always knows more today than it knew yesterday.' If this is true then perhaps believing in the impossible, improbable, and incredible might actually be the height of wisdom. Because it implies flexibility of mind and spirit, a willingness to reconsider what we thought was TRUE and to challenge what, until now, was convenient to accept. In other words, to be uncomfortably, dangerously, and deliciously ahead of the curve. 

• — •
 "All stories are true, every last one of them.

All myths, all legends, all fables.

If you believe them true, then they are true.

If you don't believe them, then all that can be said

is that they are true for someone else."

—Dave Sim, Cerebus