Opinion | The Novelist George Saunders on the Comfort of Truth

What does comfort mean to you? Truth. If you and I are in a cabin and we can hear there are wolves outside. If I say it’s cool, they’re probably dogs. That’s not comfort. But if you look at each other and go, fuck, there’s wolves, that’s comfort. But she doesn’t have the capability to communicate that to him. I’m very skeptical of this. I’m trying to think about this. That comfort is truth. Yeah. I don’t want to say I’ve never been comforted by the truth. Oh, but you, but you — I have more often been comforted — But you seek comfort for it in your work every day. You don’t —you come into work and you try to get to the bottom of complicated things, and you’re seeking comfort. I don’t find it comfortable. Well, but you’re seeking, you’re in biological — you’re seeking homeostasis. That might be right. You want to calm yourself and comfort yourself by getting in closer relation to the truth so the world doesn’t seem so anarchic. If you think of — now, this is getting a little deep — but I think if you say — It’s my hope — I mean, here’s a question. When you — have you ever been comforted by a falsehood? Yes. Which one? When I was young, I had a terrible fear of vomiting. And night after night, I would ask my parents to promise me before I went to sleep that I wouldn’t throw up. And in that time, I was comforted by that. And did it work? I did not throw up in those years. So they were telling you the truth. Although right now, one of my — I never even made this connection until the second — but one of my sons asked me to do a little spell every night to keep away bad dreams. And it has not always worked. It’s just a little like a rhyme. But I think — But he’s comforted. He asked me for it every night anyway. Because you’re working on it together. In a sense, what you’re saying is all will be well. And I think that that’s a form of you extending grace to him, which isn’t exactly truthful. The spell isn’t exactly truthful, but the substrate or the foundation of the spell is true.