“Keep yourself away from the answers,60 but alive in the middle of the question—this is the warning scrawled on the wall in the room where the acclaimed Irish novelist Colum McCann does his writing. I asked McCann what he meant by that line, and he wrote back, “We must embrace the notion that answers are in fact quite boring. The Irish are especially good or infuriating in this respect. We answer questions with questions. But in my opinion that’s a good place to be. A little perplexed by the perplexity of life.”