musicmage4114

Glide Meditation #1: A Reflection on "The Simple Truth" My first exposure to “The Simple Truth”, the first entry in the original collection of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Sequences, was actually a dramatic reading I found on YouTube. I had intended to read it during my lunch break at work, but Yudkowsky’s personal website, where that particular entry is hosted, is blocked by my employer’s Internet filter. Now that I’ve gone back and actually read the essay in its original medium, I feel like that particular turn of events is rather serendipitous; indeed, I don’t think this essay would have had nearly the same impact for me if had only read it. The fact that essay itself is written as a dialogue naturally lends itself to an audio adaptation, and that in turn made it far more accessible. As I sat and listened to Yudkowsky’s mental constructs debate over the details of the sheep-counting device, my emotional arc began at mild confusion (Yudkowsky had posited a world without the concept of counting without explicitly stating so), morphed into surprisingly intense frustration for most of the duration (the extent to which Mark must be obtuse in order for the dialogue to make its intended point truly must read/heard to be believed), and ended at resigned amusement (I think I understood it, and the ending was humorous, but I questioned whether sitting through such a frustrating ordeal was ultimately worth it). On its surface, “The Simple Truth” reads like an absurdist one-act play, and its style of humor is indeed very much reminiscent of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. For me, The Shepherd, Autrey, and Mark exhibit various methods of reasoning and behavior that impede the effective practice of the art of inquiry and discerning truth, with Inspector Darwin serving via prosopopoeia as the voice of reality. Through their actions, the former three characters highlight via contrast specific ideals of rational thought and effective communication, though I strongly suspect this