René Daumal: The Lie of the Truth

“At the beginning, there was error. Truth is one, but error proliferates. Man tracks it down & cuts it up into little pieces hoping to turn it into grains of truth. But the ultimate atom will always essentially be an error, a miscalculation.”

In this brief, dense essay, Daumal bids us to resist the very notion of the truth, and to recognize it as an artistic and metaphysical dead-end.

René Daumal (1908-1944) was a French poet and writer often associated with surrealism (though he fought against the label), spiritualism, and ‘pataphysics.’ He is perhaps best remembered for the posthumously published novel, Mount Analogue (1952).