This I Believe

This I Believe

I never had reason to doubt John Keats, the poet who wrote: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” until the birth of my son, Noah. Things went wrong; despite a “crash” delivery, Noah did not get enough oxygen for too long. The outlook was grave.

Watching our baby’s chest rise and fall to the rhythm of a ventilator, you might think I would question God, but Keats took the heat. He lied to me, I thought. Truth is not beauty.

At least since adolescence I have not pretended to know what the truth is, but I have believed that the honest pursuit of truth was always good, that knowledge was always better than ignorance. Now my son, beautiful despite the wires, tubes, and tape keeping him alive, was already challenging me. Knowing that his brain was injured would not fix it. The truth of his injury held no beauty.

Still, I couldn’t abandon knowledge. A neurologist wanted to see more images of Noah’s brain after a few weeks, when dead cells would have changed enough to show up. He admitted the scan would do little to help Noah, but would mostly add general understanding. Early images seemed to offer a great deal to hope for. Another round of scans, my wife pointed out, offered little but the chance to lose hope. I pushed, though, and got my way. The results were not beautiful.

In the eight years that have passed, I do not know whether that second scan ever helped Noah. He has become a cheery boy with a great sense of humor and very little ability to control his own muscles. Almost everyone in town knows him. Classmates compete to push his wheelchair. He is loved and enjoys life.

And every day, Noah’s life is improved by hard-won knowledge. He uses a kind of lung therapy invented for children with cystic fibrosis. For painful spasticity, he receives Botox–derived from a lethal food poison. He sports an implanted pump that feeds muscle-relaxant into his spinal fluid. The pump is similar to those that provide insulin to diabetics and is at least a cousin to a pacemaker.

All of these therapies grew from the pain of others. The truths that had to be faced to create them were not beautiful.

So I’m still mad at John Keats. For any one of us specific truths–like Noah’s injury–may be anything but beautiful. But I still believe in the pursuit of truth, because the opportunity for understanding so often comes at too a high cost to waste.

October 20, 2005