Hard questions and elephants in rooms

W.H. Auden once wrote a deliberately obscure little poem about asking hard questions: how easy they are to ask, how infinitely hard to answer. He never names the kinds of questions he is talking about but we can conclude that he means the questions that are asked flippantly, in passing, with little regard for the answer.

Questions, for instance, like "How are you?"

I commented on this a few years ago in a post that I'm linking here not because it was particularly good (it wasn't actually) but because I don't want to feel that I'm repeating myself needlessly. My point back then is similar to my point now: all too often, we ask questions like these with no particular intention of waiting for the answer. Or, more to the point, we find ourselves unable to handle complex answers to what is, in reality, a far more complex question than it seems. What if we aren't okay? Will we stop our questioner in their tracks and make them wait for the answer? Will we make do with an, "Okay," or "Good thanks"? Such answers may be the more socially acceptable, but they kind of expose the futility of the question. We might as well invent a strange gargling noise that can serve the same purpose - a form of acknowledgment that a human we know is present before us. The conversation need go no further than that.

Of course, I'm making it all sound a bit silly when I put it like that, but it really is a topic which I feel deeply about. Recent experiences of melancholy, of a kind that sometimes quite frightens me, has made it all the more important to know when an honest answer is welcome, and how it is appropriate to give it. Poorly timed honest answers can lead to the kind of vast, awkward silences in which one can distinctly hear an elephant walk into the room. Those times are certainly hard.

But here's a situation that's harder. Let's say that you are okay at a particular point in time: you've had a good day, you're talking to a person who makes you feel happy. When asked how you are - if indeed you are asked - you may find it hard to give an answer that will be meaningful. You feel fine then. You feel good, even. So how do you answer? Do you say, "Good thanks", because, for that moment, it's true? Do you then go away and, once alone, feel quite far from okay? Do you find yourself, at that moment, even further in the midst of a sinking, desperate kind of loneliness?

Auden poses no answer to the problem he raises. But he does give us a riddle, a hopeful kind of riddle which leaves us feeling as if therein, perhaps, lies something which is, if not an answer, at least a direction to walk in. Love, he suggests, might hold the solution: both the question that we really want to ask, and the answer we are too frightened to give.

Love and grace will, I pray, help me persevere through awkward silences and overcome elephants wandering into rooms. But I also pray that love may help those who ask these questions, thoughtlessly, in passing, at times and in places where no honest answer could ever be given - I pray that love might help transform those moments of awkwardness into times of true communication.