The Journey to Hallelujah
Early on as I was getting to know Bruce I asked him what his favorite quote was. He shared this one with me -- "I consecrate my life to truth" -- and told me that he had adopted it as his ethos, a personal motto, when he was thirteen years old, hitchhiking and reading the philosopher Rousseau. His naming of this shared ethos was the moment I knew we had a road to walk together. It was so fundamental to his, and our shared legacy, that it is the quote that will be inscribed on his headstone at Arlington National Cemetery.
The quote originates from a letter Rousseau wrote to a colleague and friend d’Alembert (Letter to d’Alembert, 1758) in which he is explaining a philosophical break with his friend, fellow philosopher, Diderot.[1] In this letter he declares that he has taken these words as his motto: Vitam impendere vero. In this announcement he shared that this invocation to truth serves, not just himself, but the “public good.” Our relationship with our truth can take many forms. Sometimes it comes easily. Sometimes more of a curiosity or aspiration. For Rousseau, it was in essence, a sacrifice of self. He realized it wasn’t about him; it was about a greater calling to being more deeply aligned with his inner knowing and, what I like to think, the divine. In the closing of his letter, he writes “Here is the only portrait of man, painted exactly according to nature and in all its truth [...] I want to show my peers a man in the full truth of nature; and that man shall be myself.”