An unceasing interrogation of the stories told to us by the schools now felt essential. It felt wrong not to ask why, and then to ask it again. I took these questions to my father, who very often refused to offer an answer, and instead referred me to more books. My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers - even the answers they themselves believed. I don’t know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined.

Knowing how things are doesn’t make you see them correctly, doesn’t stop you from seeing things incorrectly. Stare at the image as much as you like, it’s all in vain. It will never surrender the truth, not to your naked eyes; you have to go in armed with a straightedge.

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

—Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?

There’s something about doing it with someone else, she said, something in just talking about it, something about how it leaves you feeling afterward. Decisions seem lighter; everything is lighter.

Here, as in so many situations, the required actions were not mysterious. The impediment was the hope that the pain of those actions could, somehow, be avoided. Indeed, we always hope that a brilliant insight or very clever design will allow us to accomplish several apparently conflicting objectives with a single stroke, and occasionally we are vouchsafed this kind of deliverance.