These deliberations we are obliged to make are, to use his words from another poem in the same collection, "poised, unanswerable"; not an abnegation of duty but an unparaphrasable recognition that these are matters we are not qualified to make a final decision on.
As such it faces the same basic and unanswerable question as any other such systematisation, "by what right does it legislate to the moral sentiments?" (1981: x).
The best work in the exhibition, he says, has the same capacity to pose unanswerable, endlessly echoing questions about the human psyche as Greek or Shakespearean tragedy.
But surely philosophy – the study of unanswerable questions – cannot be packaged the same way?
Whether Long would have found the same partner by thumb power alone, or stumbled upon a different human is, alas, an unanswerable question.
At the same time it's shot through with a first-year philosophy student's fascination with big, unanswerable questions and with an excited, obsessive awareness of the possibilities and limits of theater.
Yet there are adherents of both views all the same, which demonstrates, by historical fact, that it is possible to believe in a proposition (e.g. "lines are infinitely divisible") despite recognizing unanswerable difficulties (e.g. Zeno's paradoxes).
The news spread quickly in the blogosphere, followed by the unanswerable questions.
It's the unanswerable question, like a zen koan of sports.
