Where To Start?

In 2010, I began a blog that I posted to regularly.

I styled myself “the thinker” and wrote about whatever was on my mind at the time.

I ended that blog in 2021, because I felt that it had run its course.

I was posting to it less and less often and, truth be told, I had grown tired of an odd subset of internet trolls and lurkers—the kind an academic mentor of mine once referred to as “people you know who don’t really mean you well.”

When I knew that I would be retiring from my 30-year career as a professor, I began to think about blogging again.

I started to think about what that might look and sound like in light of the lessons I learned from my earlier blogging experience.

Enter “The Questions Themselves.”

Quite frankly, I’m not wild about the title, but it’ll do, for the time being at least.

The phrase is a fragment of a longer observation made by the German poet Rainer Marie Rilke in his Letters to a Young Poet (1929):

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then, gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Unlike Rilke’s young poet, I’ve always loved the questions themselves— even (especially?) the ones that seem unanswerable.

So that’s what this blog will do: consider the questions that I try to live (with? through?) in the here and now.

With any luck, I’ll do it in a way that’s “patient” and “loving”—no promises on that front, though. (In my experience, some questions are just plain annoying.)

My hope is that you’ll come back to read and reflect on these questions too.

And if you have your own unresolved questions, I hope you’ll share them.

Because in my career as a professor of literature, those were always the discussions that I enjoyed the most.

And as I recall those conversations, I can’t help but think that they helped me gradually start to live my way into some answers.

So please join me here each week, on Mondays and Thursdays, for another unresolved question (or two).