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inconvenience. She motions, and a young man with tousled hair and a cigarette jammed between his teeth is at his side. Together they walk into the temple, where the cavernous silence is like a blanket. Before him are the tapestries of those days, the monuments to great deeds and moments of clarity, tableaus of rolling clouds and hills, figures contorted in eternal rest. The warrior knows exactly which figure represents him, and his eyes fix on it. Yes, the sword, the boots, the flowing tresses that have since thinned a bit with age. His expression is that of a tiger, his incisors flaring out. Was I really that fearsome? he thinks. What was the story that inspired that painting? Was it a falsity even then? Useless to ponder. With each telling, a tale is shaped in a different way, so that a temple is twisted into a museum, a warrior is stretched into a legend. In his travels he has met  |
historians, fierce defenders of truth and disclosure, and their tenacity was a marvel even to him. They would brandish phones like weapons, point fingers, rattle on like machines, ignorant of their own spit as it landed on the faces of those who debated against them. Truth is an absolute. Culture is an absolute. Those who adapt it or change it are doing so for their own impure ends. The stories must be told, and must be preserved. Anything else is propaganda. And the warrior would smile politely, choosing in his very silence not to take a side, but now he is in this renovated temple, and he finds himself thinking of these same words and phrases, as if they are a sickness that has seeped into him. Would it be pure to fight against this inevitable change, this revision and deletion? Perhaps it would be best to forget the past altogether, all pain, suffering, happiness. Each generation must  |
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