“Why” insists we not just perform life but understand it. It does not care if the choreography is flawless, it wants to know what dance we think we are doing in the first place. And when the music stops, only those who asked “why” will still be standing, however shaken, with a candle lit in the dark.

As Socrates put it, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented i

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