Questions for Posterity

Certain questions return. Not once, but again and again, at sixteen, at twenty-seven, at thirty-nine, and, in all likelihood, for as long as one lives. That a question keeps coming back is itself the evidence that it matters. Most of these questions have no answer. That is not a flaw in them; it is their nature. What they ask of us is not resolution, but attention: to be met again, turned over, and given, each time, whatever meaning the present moment can offer.

This began as a habit before it became a project: questions written on a whiteboard, read each morning, carried through the day. Questions for Posterity is that habit, made simple enough to keep. Open it, set down whatever question is occupying you, by hand or by voice, and send it. It is recorded, with the date, and kept.

It is not a note-taking app. It really isn't. Nor a journal, nor anything that keeps score of your visits. There is nothing here to keep up with.

A museum of human nature

A question that occurs to one person has, in some form, occurred to countless others, in every age of which we have any record. What has not existed, until now, is a place where such questions were kept as they actually arose. Not reconstructed afterward by memory, but recorded in the moment, dated, and set aside.

That is the larger aim of this project: a public archive, cross-referenced by date, meant for the historians, anthropologists, and psychologists of some later century, and simply for the curious, who wish to understand what genuinely occupied the human mind in our own.

To sign up here is to take part in that undertaking, not merely to keep a private log. Exactly what form its eventual publication will take, and when, remains to be decided. Only time will tell.

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