Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

–Emily Dickinson, genius of slanting rhymes and slanting words and slanting writing, which slip away from you when you try to pin them down.

I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that doesn’t have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular, although many men are born upright.

–E. B. White

Driving at close of day along these roads of alternating suburbs & strip malls and fields & farmland, we saw a deer running across a sun-blond field — running as fast as we were driving. He had antlers and was beautiful, big and strong, and scared. He seemed so vulnerable out there in the open, running for the scant safety of a small break of trees. Farther along was some sort of fall festival, parking lots full of glinting shiny cars. On one side in the shadows was a cramped pen full of turkeys being fattened for Thanksgiving, on the other side in the shadows a skinny black cow moved on shaky legs. I had this strange feeling I’ve been having a lot, lately, of looking at everything sideways. My understanding feels slanted. (And isn’t it hard to be human sometimes, with our cruelty, and coldness, and frailty, and absurdity, and tenderness, and beauty? Isn’t it hard to be anything at all?)

This is a slanting season, a season of slanting light and shadow, of slanting emotions, slanting days and nights. In the mornings we’re in a cloud, the fog so thick hanging over the water you can’t see the things you know to truly be there, and you have to trust your memory because you can’t trust your eyes. In the evening the darkness drops earlier and earlier and we move through it like spirits. And all the hours of the day the light falls soft and slanted and staring on the softly falling leaves.

We like to, or maybe we need to, decide about how we feel about the world around us, we like to choose a way, a right way, a path to follow, a set of beliefs and rules to govern our behavior and shape our morality. Often this is imposed from without, but not always. Often these are conscious decisions, but never entirely. This is one of those things I’ve lately been thinking about sideways. Thinking about side ways. Thinking about how we can follow the side paths that lead us to kindness and empathy and beauty, without being funneled back, unknowning, to paths that lead to bigotry and judgment and hatred. And for all these “right ways,” even the ones that claim you risk your life, your family, and your very soul if you don’t march in an orderly fashion along their chosen path, even these “right paths” usually have side ways that join with all the other side ways from all the other “right paths” in leading to a place of warmth and kindness.

This is, of course, also election season, so it’s also a season of slanted speech, of questionable truths, and sadly, now more than ever before, of outright lies. I can’t decide if I’m more angry or depressed about it, but I’ve never seen a group of men in suits demonstrating with more smugness that their right way is actually one of darkness, hatred, division, greed, and hypocrisy.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant, the truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind. Sometimes, to look at something sideways, glancingly, askew, sometimes you get a clearer picture of it, a fuller understanding. But also an understanding you can live with, a way to see the world that doesn’t cripple you entirely, that lets you carry on with your hour to hour and day to day and year to year, so swiftly and bewilderingly passing. This can be a way to carry (as we must, if we are to go on) not just the cruelty of taking away healthcare and selling weapons to evil men and fattening turkeys and deporting children and worse and worse, but the strength to do something about it, the strength to work to change it. And the strength to face the other side, too, all the slanting shadow, and all the slanting light. The strength to embrace the blinding, deafening, undoing tenderness of kindness, of the moments of connection, of the gestures of caring. When the world knocks us sideways, as it will, as it will, we can follow those side paths to a place we can meet in the warm and slanting, bewildering, ever-changing light.