Esteemed Reader: Circling the Truth

“Quid est veritas?,” asked an incredulous Roman governor to a convict on trial for sedition. What is truth?

The question has been on my mind for two reasons. The first is that this is the first issue of Chronogram not appearing in print in over 30 years of publishing. I’ll come back to this. The second follows a conversation with my son, a young man in his late teens. 

We were in the kitchen talking after a delicious dinner of barbacoa tacos with beef cheeks slow-cooked since early morning by beloved Amara, who in addition to serving as Chronogram’s CEO is also an inspired chef.

We had been talking about dinosaurs. The young man, who held a fascination with dinosaurs as a child, recently read that scientists have discovered that the Tyranosaurus Rex’s small arms were, in fact, wings. 

Feeling dismissive of conjecture about something that, it seemed to me, doesn’t matter, I pointed out that Sauropods are depicted in Bruegel the Elder’s 16th-century painting The Suicide of Saul. Such documentation by an artist making a painting two hundred years before any documented discovery of dinosaur bones is cause for consternation. 

“Which is true?” I asked. “Did dinosaurs go extinct 66 million years ago or were men riding Iguanodons in the 1540s AD?”

“There is no final objective truth,” my son insisted. “Everyone has their own truth.”

His position struck me like a blow. The truth is, for me, real and transpersonal; a transcendent ideal that I strive to perceive and express. Hearing his statement was actually painful. 

I tried to gather my thoughts and understand how my perception of an objective truth could be reconciled with the young man’s view of myriad versions of the truth. How could they both be correct?

“Can you do a kick-flip?” I asked the young man, who has been skateboarding since he was nine. He is a master of kick-flips. “Can you do a kick-flip every time you try?” 

I knew he could but he just looked at me with a smirk that said he thought it was a trick question.

“What is the truth of kick-flips?” I asked, knowing there was no answer since a kick-flip proves its own existence. “Does one of those non-skater kids that yells ‘Do a kick-flip!’ when you ride past them know the truth of kick-flips as you do?”

My point was that the effort to put something into practice brings one closer to its truth. There is an order of magnitude (which is to say, infinite) difference of truthfulness between information about something, and knowing it in its application. Such truth is in the domain of understanding, not facts.

How much do I know in experience? Effectively all of what I learned in school and hear repeated through myriad channels and casual conversation is information about things is far removed from any practical understanding. As a result, despite possessing a lot of information about things, my worldview is, by and large, ignorant.  

I looked at the stainless-steel compost pail on the counter. We had been cleaning up after dinner and the bucket of kitchen scraps was awaiting delivery to the heap outside. 

“It’s like this,” I said. “The bucket’s rim describes a circle and each point on its circumference is the terminus of a line connected to the center—the truth. To strive to understand something in practice is to move along the line from the circumference to the center. And like the lines, your understanding is closer to one another’s. You and your friends share a common understanding of kick-flips and street skating that I can’t begin to fathom. You are near the center of the circle and I am skating around on its periphery.”

I could see that the illustration had evoked a glimmer of recognition for him as it had for me, but then his friend came by and invited him to go night skating. He leaves the story here. 

Back to Chronogram. I have been pondering the significance of the magazine and recalling the aims and values that motivated us to start it in 1993. One was a formulation uttered by my then-teacher, Frank Crocitto, now deceased. 

“Instead of a point of view, have a view of the points,” he said.

This became a guiding principle in the creation of each issue of the magazine. The effort was to assemble a montage of many points of view, of the creative impulses and motivations of local people. This was not a collection of opinions but rather to tell the stories of inspirations making their way into practice and work shared with the community.

Whether it was making music, paintings, poetry, sculptures, furniture, or stone walls, we wanted to highlight meaningful work to put knowledge into practice, and reciprocally, to glean knowledge from practice. 

Now Chronogram begins its 33rd year and, like the mythical revolutionary sentenced in the Roman court, may live on in a different form, a different kind of body. 

This article appears in January 2026.