"Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous"
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“Truth” gets treated like an automatic moral upgrade, but Ondaatje tilts it into something more volatile: a substance whose effects depend on timing and dosage. “At the wrong time” is the quiet detonator in the sentence. It suggests truth isn’t a pristine absolute moving through the world untouched; it collides with circumstance, with people who aren’t ready, with systems built to punish disruption. The danger isn’t that truth is false, but that it can land like shrapnel.
Ondaatje’s work often lives in the aftermaths of war, migration, and private catastrophe, where revelation can be less cleansing than corrosive. In those landscapes, disclosure doesn’t simply illuminate; it reorders loyalties, exposes collaborators, reopens wounds someone has survived by sealing shut. The line carries a novelist’s suspicion of neat ethical scripts: telling the truth can be an act of courage, or a way to satisfy one’s own conscience at someone else’s expense. Timing becomes an ethical variable.
The subtext is also political. Truth threatens power when it arrives before institutions have invented a narrative to contain it, or when communities lack the safety to absorb it without scapegoating. “Wrong time” can mean: during a fragile ceasefire, at a funeral, in the middle of a revolution, before a victim has language for what happened. The sentence works because it refuses the comforting fantasy that honesty is consequence-free. It asks a harder question: not whether truth matters, but who pays when it arrives.
Ondaatje’s work often lives in the aftermaths of war, migration, and private catastrophe, where revelation can be less cleansing than corrosive. In those landscapes, disclosure doesn’t simply illuminate; it reorders loyalties, exposes collaborators, reopens wounds someone has survived by sealing shut. The line carries a novelist’s suspicion of neat ethical scripts: telling the truth can be an act of courage, or a way to satisfy one’s own conscience at someone else’s expense. Timing becomes an ethical variable.
The subtext is also political. Truth threatens power when it arrives before institutions have invented a narrative to contain it, or when communities lack the safety to absorb it without scapegoating. “Wrong time” can mean: during a fragile ceasefire, at a funeral, in the middle of a revolution, before a victim has language for what happened. The sentence works because it refuses the comforting fantasy that honesty is consequence-free. It asks a harder question: not whether truth matters, but who pays when it arrives.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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