Metamorphosism

Lügengeschichten

The German word Lügengeschichte is a compound noun made up of the word Lügen, which is the plural of Lüge, which means "lie", as in "fib", and Geschichte, which means "story". Translating it as "tall tale" would be insufficient, although as close as anything else I can think of, since it does include the joyous aspect of telling and hearing a wild made-up story.

A Lügengeschichte is something that a certain six-year-old girl of my acquaintance tries to wheedle out of me at bedtime, after her regulation storybook (currently James and the Giant Peach) and before serious sleeping. They are fun to hear, and as she has discovered, even more fun to tell especially if the audience does not realize they are hearing a Lügengeschichte.

The joy of telling an unrecognized Lügengeschichte, I have observed, is not the surface joy of praise or sunshine, warming the outer layers of the heart or epidermis. It is a dark, subterranean joy, replenishing the soul like deep ground water rising to soothe parched roots.

At least that's what it looked like when she came home from her first day of school to tell us a long list of things she'd done and experienced, including getting a B. "A B is good," she finished. The best Lügengeschichte, like its flightless cousin a good lie, is rooted in truth. She did go to school that day. Listening, I bought it totally until it occurred to me that she hadn't had time to do all the things she described, and that no grades are awarded on the first day of first grade.

There was no way to tell from her face or demeanor that she was making it up, though. She's so good at this. You have to believe what you are saying to be that good. While she told it, it was seamlessly true.