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News and Views

If you wanted honesty...?

11/20/2018

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As the masters of subtle understatement My Chemical Romance have it, "Well if you wanted honesty, that's all you had to say
I never want to let you down or have you go, it's better off this way..." The Musketeers have a fantastic attitude to honesty: what matters to them above all is honour, and telling the truth is absolutely nowhere on their list of things that have a value in and of themselves. If that means holding something back to save the honour of someone important, then so be it. If that means concealing something because revealing it would be hurtful or harmful, then conceal away. D'Artagnan's father tells him never to sell the sandy-coloured horse that attracts so much attention in Meung. By the time he has been in Paris for a day, it is sold. Anne of Austria gives him a diamond ring that presumably he is supposed retain as a keepsake, but that too is sold shortly afterwards. Aramis' affairs with grand ladies are obvious enough, but he never shares them explicitly even with his three great friends. Even their names are a mask. It's a strange sort of deception, though, because although it sets out to hide something, it is somehow out in the open. Athos is not his name. You know that all along, of course. But the very fact of the nom-de-guerre points out that there is an unshared truth, one that might be interesting, revelatory, exciting even, but one that his choice, to hide as he does behind the assumed name, denies you. Athos would not begrudge you wondering, but he would begrudge you asking. That is not the done thing, nor would sharing his secret be right even if you managed to discover it. 
Just to prove that my restless brain is never far away from a Pirates quote, here's one to finish this point off: 
“Me? I'm dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest. Honestly. It's the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they're going to do something incredibly... stupid.”
There's something Jack Sparrow-ish about Edward Strelley, though he isn't so ruthlessly selfish. I can't help but feel that James Longshawe is the one who might, at some point, risk his life to tell the truth. He hasn't done yet, but I can just see him being asked an awkward question, probably by Elizabeth, and giving her an answer that she won't like. Pike would side with Longshawe, and both of them are poorly equipped to maintain any sort of deception. I do wonder: if you're bad at lying, does that make you think lying is bad? 
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    Andy Richardson

    When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
    I summon up remembrance of things past,
    I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
    And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
    Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,
    For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
    And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
    And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
    Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
    And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
    The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
    Which I new pay as if not paid before.
    But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
    All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.

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