The question is more important than the answer

As much as I was effortlessly earning the high grades in math and science--high marks, as it was referred to in the old country--I knew even during my high school days that my career would not be in anything related to science and technology. I knew there was something missing, but I did not know what it was.

Decades have passed since those angst-filled days and months of what I wanted to do.  I am now one of the lucky few on this planet who does what truly interests me and I get paid for it!  Yet, I doubt that I could have clearly articulated in a couple of sentences like the following from Alan Lightman:

At any moment in time, every scientist is working on, or attempting to work on, a well-posed problem, a question with a definite answer. We scientists are taught from an early stage of our apprenticeship not to waste time on questions that do not have clear and definite answers.
But artists and humanists often don’t care what the answer is because definite answers don’t exist to all interesting and important questions. Ideas in a novel or emotion in a symphony are complicated with the intrinsic ambiguity of human nature. … For many artists and humanists, the question is more important than the answer.

 It is that wonderful ambiguity of life, of humanity, of this world, that has always fascinated me.  Even in this fascination, I am not at all keen about the answer. Instead, I just want to be breathe and drink and eat this ambiguity.

No wonder then that even with the courses I teach, I seem to always force students to think about the possible multiple interpretations. I even tell them sometimes not to expect a definitive answer from me.  I suppose my pedagogical goal, if I were to think about it that way, is that if I can help students understand that life itself is all about dealing with ambiguity, then they will know how to deal with specific instances whatever they might be.

So, yes, the questions themselves are immensely more exciting than to figure out what the answers are because, after all, the answers are what we end up trusting to be the answers.  We love somebody more than we do any other person because ...?  We love a certain music more than other types of music because ...?  Or the god we prefer. Or the place we prefer. There is simply no single answer, right?  You come up with your own answers, fully aware that you chose one answer out of a gazillion.  How fascinating!

More from Lightman:

We cannot clearly show why the ending of a particular novel haunts us. We cannot prove under what conditions we would sacrifice our own life in order to save the life of our child. We cannot prove whether it is right or wrong to steal in order to feed our family, or even agree on a definition of “right” and “wrong.” We cannot prove the meaning of our life, or whether life has any meaning at all. For these questions, we can gather evidence and debate, but in the end we cannot arrive at any system of analysis akin to the way in which a physicist decides how many seconds it will take a one-foot-long pendulum to make a complete swing.

My greatest concern and worry, from my pedagogical perspective, is that despite the high levels of literacy that humanity has achieved, there appears to be a decreasing interest in exploring and understanding and discussing the ambiguity that life is.   The humanities, as we refer to them in the academic world, are increasingly marginalized, in favor of intellectual inquiries that drive towards definitive answers.  And then the academics themselves are making the situation even worse by offering courses that have very little, if any, for students to contemplate on, writes the ever blunt Heather Mac Donald:

Sitting atop an entire civilization of aesthetic wonders, the contemporary academic wants only to study oppression, preferably his own, defined reductively according to gonads and melanin. ...
Today’s professoriate claims to be interested in “difference,” or, to use an even more up-to-date term, “alterity.” But this is a fraud. The contemporary academic seeks only to confirm his own worldview and the political imperatives of the moment in whatever he studies. 

I recall one student who angrily asked me, back when I was the director of the Honors Program, why he had to read some dead people's philosophical works from centuries ago, and why we compel students to take such courses.  Contemporary higher education legitimizes such grievances from students, who are the customers who bring in the money, and then offers courses where students can supposedly understand the ambiguity that life is by watching contemporary movies!

Heather Mac Donald puts it well:

We have bestowed on the faculty the best job in the world: freed from the pressures of economic competition, professors are actually paid to spend their days wandering among the most sublime creations of mankind. All we ask of them in return is that they sell their wares to ignorant undergraduates. Every fall, insistent voices should rise from the faculty lounges and academic departments saying: here is greatness, and this is your best opportunity to absorb it. Here is Aeschylus, whose hypnotic choruses bear witness to dark forces more unsettling than you can yet fathom. Here is Mark Twain, Hapsburg Vienna, and the Saint Matthew Passion. Here is the drama of Western civilization, out of whose constantly battling ideas there emerged unprecedented individual freedom and unimagined scientific progress.
Instead, the professoriate is tongue-tied when it comes to promoting the wonders of its patrimony. These privileged cowards can’t even summon the guts to prescribe the course work that every student must complete in order to be considered educated. Need it be said? Students don’t know anything. That’s why they’re in college, and they certainly don’t know enough to select courses that will give them the rudiments of culture. The transcripts that result from the professoriate’s abdication of its intellectual responsibility are not a pretty sight, featuring as many movie and video courses as a student can stuff into each semester. 

Her clearly articulated sentences, and the reference to Mark Twain, remind me about this that I read earlier today:

As Mark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

Maybe I should end this post, which is already way too long, with another set of wonderfully chosen right words, which together further drive home the point about the ambiguity of life. Here is a poem by Oregon's own William Stafford, whose birth centenary was the front page story of our local paper:

The Way It Is
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

A winter evening in my part of the world