The great myth is that truth is an emergent property of fact, that it bubbles up from the bottom of reality once the mind attains enough fathoms of factuality. But objective reality — all those things like gravity and light and the fossil of the Archaeopteryx that exist whether or not we believe in them — is pocked with myriad subjective realities, each lensed through the particular qualia of the perceiver, each a function not of the mind alone but of the entire organism and the whole of its lived experience, embodied and enacted by the total creature. What we call truth, and how we arrive at it, has more to do with that tessellated totality than with the mind’s rational analysis of reality. Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) explores this with her characteristic rigor of thought and passion for language in a wonderful essay about the Ancient Greeks later included in The Common Reader ( public library ) — the classic collection that also gave us Woolf on how to hear your soul .…