The notebook · September 20, 2026

The question I already know the answer to

I heard it come out of my mouth this week, and I recognised it halfway through, not at the start. “Don’t you think it would be simpler if…” There was a question at the end of it, with the rise in the voice and everything required. But there was only one box, and it was already ticked.

What bothered me is not having a view. I am allowed a view. It is having put the view in the shape of a question, because a statement can be argued with, and a question, apparently, obliges the other person to come in through the door I left open. I had made disagreeing expensive while appearing to ask for nothing.

And I saw the moment the other person worked it out. It is not a chill, it is not even a silence. It is a very short delay before answering, the time it takes to price what saying no would cost. Then he said yes. I got what I wanted and I did not like it.

There is a scene in John that has been working on me since. A man is lying by a pool. “A certain man was there, who had been sick for thirty-eight years,” the text says (John 5:5, World English Bible). And Jesus, seeing him, asks the most closed question I know: “When Jesus saw him lying there, and knew that he had been sick for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to be made well?”” (John 5:6).

Thirty-eight years. There is only one possible answer. Except the man does not give it. He answers something else entirely: “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, but while I’m coming, another steps down before me” (John 5:7). That is neither yes nor no. It is what he has been carrying for thirty-eight years, and it would never have come out without a question.

Notice who he thinks he is talking to. The English says Sir. Not Lord, not anything he has worked out. A stranger has asked him something, and the whole of it comes out anyway.

So the question was not closed. It only looked closed. It was wide enough for him to walk through it carrying all his loneliness, and he did.

Mine are not. Mine have the shape of a question and the function of a lid. I tried the next day to ask a real one, one whose answer I did not have. I heard myself lean halfway through the sentence, only slightly, on the word I would have liked back. I do not know whether it showed. I did not ask.

In Manna, one prayer a day, and not one of them asks me what I want to hear.