Is a Question Ever Finished?

Dana Whitlock, Albany Chapter

ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή

I should say first that I kept this question for four years and two months, and that I am aware of how that sounds. It belonged to a retired pharmacist in our Chapter, and it was this: What did my father want? I never met her father. I do not know what he did for a living.

I will try to be exact. When a question is yours you are always trying to get rid of it. You look for the answer the way you look for your keys. A question that belongs to someone else does not make the same demand. You are not trying to arrive anywhere. You are only making sure that it stays where it was put.

The usual idea is that a question is finished when it has been answered. In four years I never produced anything that could be called an answer. But around the third winter I noticed that I had stopped being able to think of it as a question. It had become more like a room, one I knew my way around in the dark. There was someone else in the room. I want to be careful here. I do not mean that I saw anyone. I mean that I began to walk around a particular place in it.

I told her this at a Chapter meeting. She nodded and said that he had wanted to go home, and that she had known this for some time now, though she could not say since when. He died in 1961. I looked it up, which I was not supposed to do.

A question kept long enough begins to keep you. Those of us who have laid one down on the stone do not find that it stays there.

I left my doctoral program in the second year of this. I have not been able to explain that decision to my family, and I am recording this because I was asked to.