It is unavoidable that the Big Question will come and, in the beginning, churn you into it like an obsession that is not one. No grand event need have precipitated it, nothing excitable have incited or occasioned it, no divorce, no infanticide, no screaming war have blighted one’s face or picked clean one’s fields. Horrors you may never have known, bliss either, truce either: all no matter.

Unavoidably, the Big Question comes, stunning, churning, ripping through you whether you are young or old: it makes of you a boy or a man. While giving up in the first breath or in the last is a fool’s errand, giving in, surrendering, bowing openly is an adventure, the first embarkation, the nearest to a godsend. The Big Question stands to you as you to it: accursedly or blessedly your own, a mark, and therefore no one else’s, not even possibly or ever. You take it where it takes you since wherever it takes you is the place where you may change even if such change is always up for grabs like a pledge from a Trojan.

The Big Question–what makes it such? A first confrontation wiith that which had never occurred to you, not in this way or at all, but had always lain beneath all your thinking, its very being of your being. Then O it appears, asking you in that very instant, Will you face me? How–tell me–could you have avoided me for so long, thinking over me until now? How foolish have you been and how for so long?

Humility is gravity, the greatest kind, and too a cheerfulness or at least its promise. The Big Question testing, rousing, jostling you with ferocity and utter ruthlessness, with–say it: madness–to make your new life an answer it can receive and accept. Do not be a weakling now. Go with me.