The Asking

A book made of questions, and of nothing else. There are twenty-five, in five parts of five, and each part walks one movement of Book I — a hand's worth of questions for each stretch of the road.

None of them is answered anywhere on this site, and none of them is rhetorical. A rhetorical question is a statement wearing a question mark. These are the other kind, built to be asked rather than to argue. Each one points at something inside an ordinary day and asks what is actually there. Nothing more is claimed for them than that, and nothing about them is owed belief. Whatever one of them turns up, the finding belongs to whoever did the looking, the same as everything else on these pages, and a question that turns up nothing has failed honestly and can be set down.

The rest of the site behaves differently, on purpose. The canon states a thing and offers the test of it. /questions answers what it is asked. /objections takes the hardest doubts at their strongest and concedes what is true in them. This book does none of that. It asks, and stops, because a question carried through a day does a different kind of work than an answer taken from a page, and this book exists for that work alone.

There is no order to keep and no first page. Begin with whichever part is nearest today's weather:

• /asking/the-grip — where life rubs, and what the hand is doing there.
• /asking/the-looking — attention, what it is for, and what it finds when it is turned.
• /asking/the-loosening — the clench in love, work, opinion, and fear.
• /asking/the-tending — other people, speech, and the open hand extended.
• /asking/the-carrying — ordinary life, time, and the way out of the book.

Take one question, not five. Carry it into one day, ask it in the morning, and let it ride along until evening. No one will collect the answer, and nothing here will grade the work. What would it take for one of these questions to be worth carrying twice?