Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.
Neil Gaiman
Things need not have happened to be true
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No. Just … no. “Mere facts” is just propagandized quotation marks, designed to make people think facts aren’t important.
Either you had children or you didn’t. Stories about the adventures you might have had with them won’t change this.
Washing your hands before you attend a childbirth will cut down on childbed fever. This is a true fact and it will be a bad thing if it gets forgotten.
Uh, Mr. Gaiman is a fantasist.
Probably the best of his generation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Gaiman
If you have access to Netflix you can find some of his works adapted (with his assistance) in STARDUST and THE SANDMAN. The latter in particular reflects his ambition of presenting “truth” via story. Both works come highly recommended.
Gaiman is talking about the “truths” behind stories, not literal factual/scientific truth, much less political “truth” that changes weekly. His truths are the truths (of human nature) hidden in myths and archetypes.
And the mere facts he talks about are precisely the “truths” that people tell themselves and each other, by “consensus”, that change with the wind. Examples abound, most politically charged, that each generation looks back at their precusors, shaking their heads and proclaiming “what were they thinking?”, blythly unaware of their own follies that the future will judge harshly.
His truths are to be found within stories that endure across the ages, in the works of Euripides and Shakespeare and Cervantes and Checkov, and others too numerous to list.
The future will treat him kindly.