#skepticism - Hello Poetry

Suppose that truth were a woman what then? Would not the old philosophers blush in their graves, those solemn architects of certainty, who came with iron theses and granite conclusions as though desire were conquered by hammer and decree? They approached her heavily with the terrible seriousness of men who mistake weight for wisdom. Their arguments marched like soldiers, their systems rose like fortresses, and truth in unfettered fields if she were indeed a woman only smiled behind her veil and slipped away into shadow. For who wins a woman with clumsy importunity? Who captures her with syllogisms stacked like stone? Never once did she yield herself to those dogmatic lovers who believed possession was the same as understanding. And now their doctrines stand like abandoned statues in a ruined square faces stern, eyes hollowed by centuries of doubt. Some say they have fallen. Others say they gasp still, propped against the walls of time, their marble lungs filling slow, with the dust of forgotten certainty. Perhaps those mighty systems those cathedrals of wisdom and thought with their pillars of reason and domes of eternal claim If were raised upon humbler soil, an ancient superstition that the soul sits somewhere behind the syllables of language, buried in a trick of grammar that taught us to believe in the tyrant “I,” or the audacious swelling of our private experiences into universal law of self small human facts, all too human, dressed in the robes of infinity without question. Still, we must not despise them. For dogmatism, too, had its grandeur. Like astrology charting imaginary heavens, it demanded gold, patience, devotion the long labour of minds hungry for the absolute. From such dreams rose pyramids of our thought, vast architectures of every belief stretching from Asia to Egypt, where the spirit carved eternity into heavy stone. It seems that all great things must first wander the earth as monstrous caricatures vast exaggerations of a truth not yet born. So perhaps dogmatic philosophy was only that a colossal mask, a rehearsal of certainty, a thunderous promise of the unknown waiting centuries for gentler hands to approach the woman called truth not with chains of logic but with curiosity, with patience, with the quiet courage to let her remain unpossessed, until wisdom and knowledge meet their own reflection in our final knowing.

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Mar 8

Mar 8, 2026 at 10:51 AM UTC

MalcolmG

Woman Called Truth

Suppose that truth were a woman what then? Would not the old philosophers blush in their graves, those solemn architects of certainty, who came with iron theses and granite conclusions as though desire were conquered by hammer and decree? They approached her heavily with the terrible seriousness of men who mistake weight for wisdom. Their arguments marched like soldiers, their systems rose like fortresses, and truth in unfettered fields if she were indeed a woman only smiled behind her veil and slipped away into shadow. For who wins a woman with clumsy importunity? Who captures her with syllogisms stacked like stone? Never once did she yield herself to those dogmatic lovers who believed possession was the same as understanding. And now their doctrines stand like abandoned statues in a ruined square faces stern, eyes hollowed by centuries of doubt. Some say they have fallen. Others say they gasp still, propped against the walls of time, their marble lungs filling slow, with the dust of forgotten certainty. Perhaps those mighty systems those cathedrals of wisdom and thought with their pillars of reason and domes of eternal claim If were raised upon humbler soil, an ancient superstition that the soul sits somewhere behind the syllables of language, buried in a trick of grammar that taught us to believe in the tyrant “I,” or the audacious swelling of our private experiences into universal law of self small human facts, all too human, dressed in the robes of infinity without question. Still, we must not despise them. For dogmatism, too, had its grandeur. Like astrology charting imaginary heavens, it demanded gold, patience, devotion the long labour of minds hungry for the absolute. From such dreams rose pyramids of our thought, vast architectures of every belief stretching from Asia to Egypt, where the spirit carved eternity into heavy stone. It seems that all great things must first wander the earth as monstrous caricatures vast exaggerations of a truth not yet born. So perhaps dogmatic philosophy was only that a colossal mask, a rehearsal of certainty, a thunderous promise of the unknown waiting centuries for gentler hands to approach the woman called truth not with chains of logic but with curiosity, with patience, with the quiet courage to let her remain unpossessed, until wisdom and knowledge meet their own reflection in our final knowing.