Truth and False

What is the difference between truth and false? Now this may sound as a rather unnecessary question, a superfluous one, to say the least, for we all know the answer or we think we do.

The answers seem self-evident. Truth is what is real, and false is what is not real. Is this good enough a distinction? Does it tell us exactly what the two are except that they are opposite of each other? If truth is always what is real, then who and how would 'real' be defined at any given point in time. Today, I am depressed and out of sorts and the world seems like a horrible and a cruel place to me where I can't find peace. That is real and consequently true to me. Tomorrow, I am in a better mood and I find the world hardly threatening and hostile and it becomes a congenial pleasant place to me. In both instances, the world was the same, it did not change, what changed was my mood and along with it my perception of the world and hence my reality of that world. So, it is deduced from this, that truth isn't what's real, but my biases and feelings, so in a manner, when I thought the world bad or when I thought the world good, in both cases what I considered as truth was actually not real and hence false. If this is so then don't truth and false amount to the same thing and not things opposed to each other like night and day, life and death?

We as a society, as people have an undue fascination with truth. Truth is said to be equal to pure good. And there is an aversion to False. False is considered synonymous to evil, to darkness, to deception and the devil himself.

To me this isn't as clear cut and straight. I think the boundaries between truth and false blur at some point in life, but this may not be the case in literature where everything is sharpened against a foil. We love precision, we love to be exact, to be proven right, to be in the good and we love to be truthful. But, little do we realize that our thoughts, our biases, our way of looking at the world itself will shape what we see as good and bad, and what we hold true.

In our quest for absolutes, for definiteness, for clarity and lucidness we tend to overlook the fact that most things are elusive, imprecise, subjective and unquantifiable in so many ways. All our efforts to put things in opposing columns and categories pitched against one another seem futile and empty, for in life nothing is absolute, nothing is for sure, and probably nothing is true!