“A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; / How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.”Walt Whitman · Fire de iarbă · 1855 · Song of Myself, secțiunea 6
The simplest questions are the ones we can no longer answer honestly.
The child's question disarms all authority: the seemingly learned man finds he cannot answer something he holds in his hands. The mechanism is the turning of a simple question into a metaphysical one — grass becomes a possible symbol of death, birth, and nature's uniformity. It is like a child asking what time is, and realizing your definitions are only habits of language.
Whitman does not rush to give a correct answer. He admits his ignorance, and then still begins to guess: maybe grass is a flag, maybe it is the hair of the dead, maybe it is a sign made by nature. It is a rare lesson: saying "I don't know" does not close the conversation, it opens it. Think of a child asking you why the sky is blue. If you admit you have no ready answer, you can explore together. If you repeat a memorized definition, the child learns that questions get closed with formulas. Honesty about not knowing is, paradoxically, the beginning of thinking, not its end. But what happens when the ignorance is not yours alone, but the whole community's?
Why it matters Useful for anyone working with children or hard questions: the simplest questions are often the ones we can no longer answer honestly.