Questions, then and now

What questions did you ask when you were young, and what questions do you ask now? This, an assignment I gave my evening class this week. They have to write something every class, and I have to come up with interesting challenges. The students, women and men, middle aged to young, from Brazil to Kazakhstan to Vietnam, take these tasks seriously, and open themselves in ways that make me a little ashamed of my reserve.

One said, in paraphrase: when I was young, I wanted to know where the stars came from; now I want to know if Liverpool will win the league title.

Another wrote: when I was young, I wondered how big the grave would have to be to bury a car that people said had died; now I ask: why am I not rich?

One remarked: I used to ask why my mother made me stop playing outside with my friends, and made me do schoolwork.

One said she had many questions when she was young, for instance, how turtles were born. Now, her compelling questions are about what foods are healthy to eat.

Where do those ingenuous questions go? Have we found satisfying answers and moved on to more serious queries?  Or were we new to serious answers and taken by the kinds of questions that could elicit them?  Or were we smitten by curiosity as by young love? Is there a cupid of kid's questions?

By contrast, the questions now reflect experience with the complexity of life: why are families so busy; why do I enjoy and hate living in cities; why does love hurt so much?

Is there another age of questions yet to come? I'm much older than you, my students, and I can say that I enjoy questions of innocent ignorance, as well as those of ambivalence and complicity, but also now, questions about the meaning of marvelous-ness. For that seems to be a key element in almost everything I encounter: the Scotsman who takes part in Civil War reenactments, the activist who's passionate about camellias, the half-dozen names for shades of skin-color Brazilians have invented, the magical candle-light walk through the gallery of ancient sculpture in Sorrentino's The Great Beauty, the tiny Magritte-like paintings of Fanny Brennan, the robust greenly-green of the unabashed parsley in my garden, the poem of Primo Levi of December, '45, a mere 6 months after his liberation from Auschwitz...

That these things should be, and more, and regularly, astounds me. Wonder is the question behind the question. I promise you, my students, you'll find your queries drilling deeper and deeper into the quiddity of things. Thank you for being so candid. Apart from the practice it gives you in English, it is a good exercise for life.