pebble thoughts, pebble questions

Yiyun Li is the mother of two sons, both of whom committed suicide in their teen years. Things in Nature Merely Grow is the book she wrote after her younger son passed. She doesn’t waste words in this book. She doesn’t give advice. But between bladed passages that made me cry, she offers stark wisdom that is somehow gentle and unforgiving at once.

Li relays that a friend of hers stopped her short during a spiraling moment. Her friend, Brigid, tells her the question she was thinking about was a pebble question. Not worthy of her fixation and rumination. Better to simply kick out of her path. 

Li describes herself as someone who thinks her way through the world rather than feeling her way through. And she indicates, without saying so outright, that this thinking disposition can get one into trouble. Fixing the machinery of the mind on a question can generate a logic that demands the thinker’s obedience. You have to find the answer; the answer really matters; the answer must arrive within this system. 

Li says that if life is a Sisyphean endeavor, if we’re in a forever present, endlessly pushing a boulder up a hill, we should at least make sure we’re pushing a boulder and not a pebble. Let the tragedy of life properly run its course as tragedy, rather than hauling pebbles around. 

My early sense in reckoning with this is the pebble questions might be, most often, questions of identity. We can try to answer those in the abstract; we can try to get there from first principles. But likelier more useful to others and more satisfying to ourselves is answering “who am I?” and “what am I for?” with the dirty, provisional, stumbling logic of doing. 

-eric