I’ve always liked knowing why things happen. I used the epigraph above for my terrible first novel, which I wrote in college. I’m interested in my past but not that production. May it sleep forever in merited obscurity.

My curiosity is a peculiarity, not a commonplace. Many people follow puppy Henry’s lead and take the world as they find it. Familiar the folk tale whose protagonist suffers for posing too many questions. It interests me that the idiom, “It is what it is,” has come into vogue during my lifetime. (It arrived, it seems, a few months before I did.) The phrase both juts its jaw in resignation and discounts any search for an explanation. “It is what it is,” it implies, “— and I can take it.” And “it is what it is – don’t bother asking why.”

To my nosy mind, nothing “is what it is.” I hold with King Lear, “Nothing comes from nothing.” Every event is a result of occurrences that reach infinitely to invisibility. My parents made me as their parents made them and so forth.

A friend forwarded me a scientific disquisition on why free will’s a myth. I smiled. The same debate has been raging since before writing. If God made me, how can I be to blame? If God made everything, how to explain evil (theodicy)? If God did not make life on earth, who or what did and why? Are we responsible for who we are, as individuals or tribes? Maybe we should quit trying so hard, loll on the tide of time…

I believe evolution to be a vast accident, that if certain factors altered in the galaxy we’d have come out different. The Sistine ceiling can be traced to the Big Bang: Michelangelo couldn’t help being what he was or making what he made. I cannot deduce my significance. But I can envision it – that is the human difference. No doubt I’m a conduit for an inexorable stream, but that’s not what it feels like. Fate, though it may rule, like a wise parent permits me to imagine my agency. I’m extruding these words because I’ve chosen to and can make them better or worse.

This interplay of inevitability and chance makes history endlessly entertaining. At present, in the car, Jane and I are listening to a biography of Napoleon. Again and again his career is punctuated by what look like lucky breaks. If this bullet hadn’t ricocheted or this rival overslept, how different our world today! The same wonder envelops most lives. Who would I be if a lady way back when had said yes, if my younger son hadn’t gotten sick, if at a matinee of Die Walkure I hadn’t met Jane? Such speculations topple us into a vertigo of maybes – what if, what if, what if!

It is easier to ignore such conundrums, but that’s not our call. We are curious by nature not by choice. What surprises me is that more folks aren’t humbled by their history. When hotshots boast, I can barely suppress my guffaw. What asses! No one is “self-made.” The luckier we are, the more modest we should be, the more allergic to pride. Who flaunts their accomplishments parades their fatuity. To preen is a social fart.

Searching for causes provides endless entertainment. Ask why and I’m off spying like Sherlock with his glass. Mysteries multiply with inspection. Now I’m wondering, for example, why I wrote this missive.

I’ll get back to you.