The Future of Truth, Werner Herzog, Bodley Head, £14.99

Werner Herzog devotes nearly four pages of this book to an account of the preposterous plot of Verdi’s opera La forza del destino.

‘In the opera’, he concludes, ‘this outrageous  story and its emotions are strangely accepted as true.’

What truth there is in the opera is made by music. That facts do not – cannot – constitute truth is the primary theme of this astounding book. Herzog has, he writes, always been ‘vigorously opposed to the foolish belief that truth equates with facts’. What, then, is truth? ‘We don’t know… but we will not, must not, give up the search for it.’ The search for truth, Herzog believes, is what ‘distinguishes us from the beast in the field’.

In his documentary Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds Herzog watches arctic explorers walking across a nightless 5,000 kilometre desert of ice. It seems pointless: ‘But we knew of a place where not our feet but our souls start to travel, a place where we transcend our human existence.’ A place, in other words, of an ungraspable truth.

Since I first encountered his work, I have never doubted that Herzog is a genius, one of the greatest artists of our time. All his works are mysterious; they never quite resolve into a simple idea or conclusion. This book explains why.

It is full of stories, many of which may not be true. The ‘Palermo Pig’ stands out. The unfortunate beast was jammed in a rubbish chute where he was fed copiously by the locals. He was finally rescued but he had grown into a massive cube with no functioning legs. Herzog tells this story because, he says, this is roughly what would happen to astronauts on a very long space voyage to, say, Alpha Centauri, four and a half light years away. They would reproduce and, like the pig, become monstrous and incapable.

If we seek the truth, here and now is where we must look for it. It will be harder than ever to find because we are entering a post-truth world of fake news and fake people emerging from the digital fakery of AI. In politics ‘every trace of truth seems to have disappeared’ and, online,  provocative lies travel three times as fast as simple facts. Even for a man who thinks we have yet to grasp the truth, the endless corruption of facts makes life harder.

He loves science, especially its axioms – ‘the ultimate, unprovable theorems in mathematics’ – because it aspires to facts that may, one day, provide a glimpse of truth. And, like those Arctic explorers, he loves walking. And, he says – this might be true but not a fact – that he walked around Germany East and West before reunification in the hope this might bring them together. It worked, of course.

‘The world’, he has said, and here he says it again, ‘reveals itself to those who travel on foot.’

He also walked from Munich to Paris in the belief this might save the life of his friend, the writer and film critic Lotte Eisner, who was seriously ill. He is very keen on going to Mars, but Elon Musk has not yet invited him. And he professes himself irked that only technical types – no poets – have been allowed to go on space missions. He describes Musk as ‘a mosaic of half-truths’, which may be faint praise because he did not say ‘half facts’.

He respects religion. He once converted to Catholicism, though that lasted only a few years. But he continued to be fascinated by the stories of faith, especially the ones that rise from the geology of landscape. He also finds something transcendent, as well as exotically funny, in the Japanese companies that provide actors to stand in for missing or lost relatives or provide company for lonely old men who long to go on a pub crawl. This provided the basis for his Japanese-language film Family Romance LLC.

Towards the end of the book there is a distinct change of tone. He becomes prophetic, even messianic.

‘Are we really willing to give up thinking, to give up dreaming?’ he asks. His target is fakery and the mass of lies on the internet.

‘Instead of spending our lives in an echo chamber of our own prejudices and preferences, it’s a good thing to meet others from time to time. One should treat the internet with the same caution as other media. No exceptions.’ And, he adds ominously, ‘We don’t have much time to grow up.’

The pursuit of truth ‘gives meaning and dignity to our existence’. We may never get there, but what else is there to do?