ABSTRACT
The question is a way of unveiling reality, getting it to show its secret self. Some artists circle back to the same question, it is rich enough to sustain them for an entire lifetime. A great question exceeds its answer, leading to a series of potential responses. The “why” is, in many ways, the largest and most all encompassing of questions. The 19th Century Russian novelists had a special term for the big questions of life, they called them proklyatye voprosy, which roughly translates as “the accursed questions.” They were as large as the Russian landscape that inspired them. On the real/personal axis, the question spoke to a secret fear that many feel in the face of another’s illness: that they might turn out to be incapable of meeting the demands of being a caretaker; of being afraid, incompetent, or just plain selfish.
