Truth is often mistaken for light—clear, visible, and illuminating. But in reality, truth is spare: lean, unsentimental, and rarely comforting. It does not dress itself to please the eyes, nor bend itself to soothe the heart.

“What we call incompassion is not cruelty—it is simply the absence of illusion.”

Why does truth bring incompassion? Because it owes us nothing. It neither flatters our illusions nor consoles our fears. Compassion is a gesture of humanity, of warmth and mercy. Truth, on the other hand, is elemental. It is fire and stone—honest, but cold. It reveals. And in revealing, it destroys pretense.

Why is truth absent on the surface? Because the surface is where convenience lives. It is decorated with beliefs, customs, and desires that protect us from the deeper currents. Truth lives beneath—beneath the noise, the image, the mask. It must be dug out. And to dig is to labor, to suffer, to question.

“To build on truth, one must first see it. And to see it, one must first unsee all that was comfortable.”

Thus, the conceiving of anything true must begin in absence— in the abandonment of the obvious, the popular, the pleasing. Only then can something honest be born. Only then can we build not on illusion, but on the grave of illusion.