Nora Ephron
So you can imagine my surprise to find, buried in a fawning interview in the National Post by Nathalie Atkinson, as ripe a piece of relativism as I have seen in print this year. Atkinson asks her why her love for journalism is in the past tense; in short, why did she quit writing it?“Eventually, when I started writing what you might call fiction,” Ephron says, “it became clear to me that there was no such thing as the truth.” Expanding on what she says in the piece: “That except for a very few things for wont of a better world we would call facts, everything is a story, a point of view. And that was a kind of revelation. And at that moment, all the pretentiousness that I had had as a journalist and other people still have as journalists, about “the first draft of history’ and the objective truth just went out the window. But I still loved that job. I don’t think there’s any better job when you’re young.”Oh, boy. Where do I start? 'A very few things . . . we would call facts?' How about grains of sand on a beach. If you start at one end of Daytona Beach in Florida, and take your time, you can factually count every grain of sand on the beach. The number is astronomical, not minimal, and that's just one thing on one beach. The truth is, the world is entirely composed of facts; objects and actions, and nothing else.
'No such thing as the truth?' Let's deal with that too, because it's the key claim relativists try to make time and time again.
Question. Did Nora Ephron sit down for an interview with Nathalie Atkinson? Let's examine the evidence. You have her article and here, from the National Post, you have this picture.
And you have this caption: "Nora Ephron, director and author, poses for a photograph at the Soho Metropolitan Hotel in Toronto on Wednesday, November 10, 2010. Ephron is in Toronto to promote her new book, 'I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections
.'" And you have this photo credit: Matthew Sherwood for National Post.
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