What was the first question?
Was it: “Where is the food?”? And if so, doesn’t that mean that “where?” was in some sense the first question? Does it all come down to the number one lesson taught to freshmen journalists—that there are six questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Was it really believed that the answers to these six questions made a complete story? Then are these the only questions, and everything else is a refinement?
Or are there other questions, questions that are more complex, questions for which there is no consensus on answers, or questions whose answers are so troubling that we keep asking them as a way to avoid the answer? When the French aristocrat Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville—by the way, didn’t he have too many names and were his parents people who couldn’t make up their minds?—analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of American democracy in the 1830s, wasn’t the big question about America: “Can it be believed that democracy, after having destroyed feudalism and overthrown kings, will retreat in the face of the bourgeois and the wealthy?”? Almost two centuries of American democracy later, doesn’t this question still lay here like the package no one wants to open? How many of Tocqueville’s troubling questions have been answered? How many really good questions ever do get answered? Or is it more important that they get asked?
“Why can’t I find anything but the Big Dipper?”
“How am I different than a bee?”
