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Now in his 80s, the celebrated director remains a living legend that works entirely on his own terms. Similar to his strange and mesmerizing films, Herzog's seventh book defies traditional rules of composition, merging the lines between truth and fantasy while exploring the very concept of truth itself.

A Slim Volume on Truth in a Digital Age

The brief volume presents the filmmaker's opinions on truth in an time saturated by digitally-created deceptions. These ideas resemble an elaboration of Herzog's earlier declaration from 1999, containing powerful, gnomic viewpoints that include rejecting cinéma vérité for hiding more than it clarifies to shocking declarations such as "prefer death over a hairpiece".

Core Principles of the Director's Authenticity

Several fundamental principles form Herzog's understanding of truth. Primarily is the notion that chasing truth is more important than ultimately discovering it. According to him explains, "the pursuit by itself, drawing us toward the hidden truth, enables us to participate in something inherently elusive, which is truth". Second is the concept that plain information deliver little more than a boring "accountant's truth" that is less useful than what he describes as "exhilarating authenticity" in guiding people understand life's deeper meanings.

Were another author had composed The Future of Truth, I suspect they would receive severe judgment for taking the piss out of the reader

Italy's Porcine: An Allegorical Tale

Experiencing the book is similar to hearing a campfire speech from an entertaining family member. Included in several gripping narratives, the weirdest and most striking is the account of the Italian hog. In Herzog, long ago a pig became stuck in a upright drain pipe in the Sicilian city, the Italian island. The pig was stuck there for years, surviving on leftovers of sustenance tossed to it. In due course the swine developed the shape of its container, becoming a sort of semi-transparent block, "ghostly pale ... shaky like a large piece of jelly", taking in nourishment from above and eliminating excrement below.

From Earth to Stars

The author utilizes this narrative as an symbol, relating the trapped animal to the perils of long-distance space exploration. If humankind begin a journey to our closest livable world, it would take centuries. During this period Herzog foresees the courageous voyagers would be obliged to inbreed, turning into "genetically altered beings" with no awareness of their journey's goal. Ultimately the space travelers would transform into light-colored, maggot-like entities rather like the trapped animal, able of little more than ingesting and shitting.

Rapturous Reality vs Accountant's Truth

This disturbingly compelling and unintentionally hilarious shift from Sicilian sewers to cosmic aberrations provides a lesson in Herzog's notion of ecstatic truth. Because readers might find to their surprise after trying to confirm this intriguing and biologically implausible geometric animal, the Italian hog seems to be fictional. The quest for the restrictive "accountant's truth", a reality grounded in basic information, misses the purpose. What did it matter whether an confined Italian livestock actually became a trembling square jelly? The true point of Herzog's story unexpectedly is revealed: restricting creatures in limited areas for extended periods is unwise and generates monsters.

Distinctive Thoughts and Audience Reaction

If another writer had authored The Future of Truth, they might face harsh criticism for strange structural choices, digressive comments, inconsistent concepts, and, honestly, teasing from the audience. In the end, the author devotes multiple pages to the theatrical narrative of an musical performance just to illustrate that when artistic expressions feature intense feeling, we "channel this preposterous core with the complete range of our own emotion, so that it seems mysteriously authentic". Yet, since this volume is a collection of particularly characteristically Herzog musings, it resists severe panning. The excellent and creative version from the original German – where a mythical creature researcher is characterized as "lacking full mental capacity" – in some way makes Herzog increasingly unique in approach.

Deepfakes and Current Authenticity

While much of The Future of Truth will be known from his prior publications, films and discussions, one relatively new aspect is his contemplation on deepfakes. The author alludes repeatedly to an computer-created perpetual conversation between fake sound reproductions of himself and another thinker in digital space. Because his own methods of achieving rapturous reality have included fabricating statements by famous figures and casting artists in his factual works, there lies a risk of hypocrisy. The distinction, he claims, is that an intelligent mind would be adequately capable to discern {lies|false