Overtures on Some Unanswerable Questions
This book-length work illuminates the fundamental problems that come with being human, and that can make a rewarding identity an ongoing challenge. One is the experience of being two people at once: both a participant in life and an observer of one’s own behavior. The one who participates interacts with others, talks, laughs, shares their company, while the observer watches from the inmost depths with a freedom which separates them from others, and leaves one solitary and alone. But which is the more real and to which do we owe our allegiance and attention?
A second problem is the experience of having both a past and a future, and of having a mind divided between memory and expectation, or hope. Memory insists that who we were is the one we now are, while the future offers nearly unlimited possibilities of being someone else, better, more capable, or successful. The choice of living for one or the other over time shapes our identity, but which inclination is more important, and which is more likely to result in modest self-esteem? Additional psychological conflicts stem from the need to choose between goodness and pleasure, between love and freedom, and between belief and unbelief.
Overtures on Some Unanswerable Questions provides liberating solutions to such problems and points the way toward an authentic sense of self. As yet unpublished, the book is a mixed-genre work containing nonfiction and fiction, with several of its pieces having already appeared as articles and stories in literary journals. Five of them were published as meditations in the Potomac Review (October 2023), which prompted its editor to declare: “you absolutely can and should put these in a book.” And one of the fictional pieces, “The Yoke of Unknowing,” which concerns belief and unbelief, appears online in Written Tales Magazine (June 26, 2023). A third part of the book has been published under the title, “The Essence of Consciousness,” in JCER 13 (3).