La Vida Es Mentira y las Mentiras, Mentiras Son

My father once told me that Eugene O'Neill's 1939 play The Iceman Cometh was the one thing I should read if I really wanted to know more about people. And indeed, the play taught me more about the way people really are than a dozen Hollywood movies.

Granted, it wasn’t a nice lesson. We all like to think that we are a lot better than we are. That we don’t delude ourselves with lies and illusions. That we don’t continually put off attempts to improve ourselves. And yet we also know that deep down there are worse things we can do than trap ourselves within our self-made myths.

For often our attempts to make others face the truth prove to be just one more way of hiding from the unpleasant truths of our own existence. Or so O’Neill would have us believe.