If you look down enough alleys in Chicago, you will eventually see a cellist in a bowler hat. I know this is true, based on personal experience. In 2015, I was at the Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival in Rogers Park, heard the distinctive low rosined rumbling of a cello, turned my head and saw this fellow and his instrument.
I later wrote something. At the time, I thought it was a story about ignorance, which has its own attractions, and knowledge, which bears its own disappointments.
This is how I explained it:
“When you are confronted with something enigmatic, you can do one of two things. You can either keep going about your business, accepting the gift of its mystery. Or you can investigate, plunge into the thicket, push aside the leaves of the puzzle and try to find the truth within. The former is probably the better path for a life imbued with tantalizing possibility and, even, magic. Had I kept walking, i would forever wonder.”
I didn’t keep walking; I found out and wrote a blog post. When I stumbled upon it after more than a decade, something struck me, something more important that I missed at the time.
The opening sentence is a lie.
Most people, no matter how many alleys they gaze down, will never see a cellist in a bowler hat.
What made me think otherwise? Made me believe a clear falsehood is actually a general truism? Easy. Because it happened to me. The fog of personal experience blinds us. Push someone with a strong opinion —immigrants out! —as to why they feel that way, and you inevitably find some minor incident. They were disturbed by music being blasted late a night, magnified into unshakable conviction because it happened to them.
I crafted the opening sentence in 2015, affected by what had just happened. To me. But you weren’t there; so why did you accept it? And I bet you did. You didn’t stop, pound your fist and say, “No! I’m never going to see that.”
Why? Well, you read it in a newspaper. A trusted source. There is a photograph, right there, of a cellist in a bowler hat, in an alley. For all the AI hubbub, you don’t distrust your eyes. Perhaps most importantly: the lie conjures up the romantic image of a city of unlimited possibility we want to embrace. Leading to an important truth: we believe what we want to believe.
That’s why Donald Trump lying is no big deal — not to me, or to anyone else. Did he just offer every American $5,000 if the Republicans win the midterms? And immediately killjoy journalists began toting up all the unfulfilled Trump bribe promises — the DOGE refund, the tariff compensation and so on.
Completely missing the point: The purpose of this continual lying isn’t to make us believe any one given untruth. It’s to undermine the value of truth and falsehood. I believe Trump could promise to burn every church in America to the ground if the midterms go his way, and he wouldn’t lose a Republican vote. Because they’re not processing anything he says anymore. Or as I’ve written before: Once you get in the habit of ignoring reality, the exact nature of the reality being ignored hardly matters.
Short term. But long term, truth has consequences.
Our summer was scoured by storms and fires that are going to get worse and worse because what Al Gore called “An Inconvenient Truth,” at least too inconvenient for people who sell coal and gasoline.
Vaccines are essential and lifesaving. Having a president and secretary of health who think otherwise lights the fuse on a time bomb. In six months or a year, when diseases that we contained decades ago are scything through elementary schools across the country, parents will look up, aghast, and wonder, “How could we have believed them?” Because they wanted to, a lesson learned too late to bring their children back.
Yes, certain lies are stylistic — an excuse I’ll use to forgive myself the cellist fib. Untruth can be a story, harmless entertainment, like going to the opera and enjoying ourselves, even though there was no Carmen, no cigarette factory, no bullfight.
What’s wrong with believing anything can happen? That if you wait on a Chicago street corner long enough, an elephant will walk by. It did happen, once — July 2, 1943, Judy the Elephant refused to get into a truck at the Brookfield Zoo, so the 7,200 pound pachyderm was walked the 18 miles up First Avenue, along Washington Boulevard, all the way to the Lincoln Park Zoo.
Well, for starters, if you plan on camping out now, waiting for the next one, it’ll be a long wait.