Chapter Three: The First Question

Chapter Three: The First Question

Here is the question I could not stop asking myself at seventeen, at midnight, when the performance of the day had ended and the room was dark and honest: Who is this person? Not in the existential sense — not yet, that came later. In the more immediate, more embarrassing sense. When I was first in my class I was the boy who was first in his class. When I was with Layla I was the boy who was with Layla. When I was doing the things that boys in my situation did — the studying, the socializing, the maintenance of a reputation — I was the boy who did those things. But who was doing all of this? What was at the center of it, generating the doing? I would lie in bed and try to find it. The essential Hur. The irreducible core underneath the performances. I would lie there for a long time. There was the boy who understood machines. There was the boy who was good at transactions. There was the boy who felt things he did not show. There was the boy who showed things he did not feel. There was the panic that arrived without invitation. There was the name. There was Hur. There was the free one. What does the free one want? What does the free one want when he is not performing freedom?

I did not have an answer. The question was too new and I was too busy to sit with it for long. The morning always came with its requirements and I was good at meeting requirements and the question would be deferred until the next midnight when the requirements were temporarily suspended. This is, I think, how most of the significant questions of a life get deferred: not by decision but by the perpetual availability of the next requirement. The requirements are always there. The question is always waiting. The question is very patient. It has more time than you do.