Words I hate

Why.

In the overflowing department store of human language, I imagine the Question words would be shelved alongside tools. Questions aren't merely ornate drapery like adjectives, or clunky dust-collecting detritus like nouns, or the pushy warehouse staff of verbs. They are rough and ready devices we use to scrape and screw and hammer at the world at large.

We might be tempted to compare "Where" to a map, but it's really just a long, stiff rod, used to point. "What" is more powerful. Like a flashlight, it illuminates so that we may understand those nouns and verbs better. Sometimes, like an X-ray, it penetrates the surface of objects in space, sometimes it acts like a magnifying glass, or a lens, but is is always a vision of our reality. "When" is of course a clock, or metronome, ticking away the moments that make up a dull day, and "How" is nothing more than reams of graph paper and a pen of bottomless ink: an ostensive system of symbolic language we use to diagram the "what" and the "when" and the "where" of the world.

And then there is "Why."

It's less a tool, than a tome-covered wall, a wing-back chair and a pipe reeking of tobacco. It's hunkering down with the a single thin leaf of "how" and trying to peel that page in two identically sized but thinner sheaths, and having succeeded, trying to divide them again. It is, in a sense, the conclusion that there are not enough books on the wall, and not enough hours in the wing-back chair and not enough tobacco nor pipes in the world to decide questions as resolutely solved.

While "what" may serve to illuminate the darkest room, and "where" might guide us to the place we never expected to find answers, and "when" might remind us of our place in the utter calamity of existence, "why" does quick and steady violence to what we think we know. It's more than a cascade of books' pages dividing in a reckless mitosis: it is an earthquake, destroying a mountain, in the depths of hell.

Like causation, free will, God, consciousness, and Harvey Kornbluth's sense of self worth, one has an urge to believe in "why" more than one can satisfy what it truly requires. Namely, an unblinking dissatisfaction with the way anything is. Imagine the arrogance to demand that we not only understand the present in toto, but the entirety of the past and the meaning of the future too. It is the question, "what came first" and thus shall never be answered; any more than one can address "what is what?" and "how does how?" and "when is when?" and when there is no more paper left to splice, Why will still hold aloft a scalpel and furrow its brow and cite its sources and sigh, bemused the the ground has not yet stopped shaking.

I often ruminate on why I write these words, but no more. Instead, I resolve to remember the angle of the sun or moon, the firmness of the chair upon which I sit, the temperature of the wind, and then use these words to assemble the what, the when, and the where to explain how -- whatever the how -- and leave the why untouched between the fibres of the versos and rectos of philosophy textbooks.