Reputations Hobbled by the Book of Lamentations

“The man has not been born yet who
can write about himself the truth.”
So Mark Twain wrote. His words are true
regarding old age, but not youth,
for it’s not hard to tell of facts
that when they long ago occurred
embarrassed us, though clearly acts
that challenged what seems as absurd
now we are older as when they
occurred. Our youthful indiscretions
now give us pride, but we all pray
that only God hears our confessions
concerning what we do when old
enough to know just how we should
behave. These stories can’t be told
by us, though fully understood,
when they’re about ourselves, although
when they’re about our family or friends
we do relate all that we know,
plus what we don’t, if it offends
just them but not ourselves, unless
we feel that what demeans them may
detract from us, when we tell less,
since it’s ourselves whom we portray,
unless like Samuel Pepys we are
either interesting or famous,
and posthumously read, we mar
ourselves with unforgotten words that shame us.
False views, hobgoblins of the mind,
evade corrections:  Their persistence
can cause us to be to undermined,
uncured, incurred through their consistence

as lamentable as our in-
consistencies that ruin reputations,
like Jewish history’s literary hobgoblin,
Jeremiah’s Book of Lamentations.

In “We’re Taught to Hate Hypocrisy We Shouldn’t,” NYT, 8/4/24, by Lydia Polgreen writes:

A manichean devotion to principle brings its own peril. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his best-known essay, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” But it is a less famous line from that essay, “Self-Reliance,” that has always stuck with me. It suggests that finding yourself abandoning a principle may well be a necessary precursor to changing your mind based on something new. It is, Emerson wrote, “a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present.”