He was repelled by the pettiness that reduced life to mere existence and that turned men into half-men. He wanted to lay his life on a balance, the o… - Milan Kundera

What does it mean to live in truth? Putting it negatively is easy enough: it means not lying, not hiding, and not dissimulating.

When we are thrust out into the world just as we are, we first have to identify with that particular throw of the dice, with that accident organized by the divine computer: to get over our surprise that precisely this (what we see facing us in the mirror) is our self. Without the faith that our face expresses our self, without that basic illusion, that arch-illusion, we can not live or at least we cannot take life seriously. And it isn‘t enough for us to identify with our selves, it is necessary to do so passionately, to the point of life and death. Because only in this way we can regard ourselves not merely as a variant of a human prototype but as a being with its own irreplaceable essence.

People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder, but because they're going deaf, it has to be played louder still.