Question 7

“Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning to beginnings—why we seek the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life in the hope that behind it we will find the truth of why.

But there is no truth. There is only why. And when we look closer we see that behind that why is just another tapestry.

And behind it another, and another, until we arrive at oblivion.”

This quote is exemplary of Flanagan’s tone throughout Question 7 wherein he reflects on The Nature of Writing. He positions the work overall as his search for “beginnings,” but recognizes here that this search is essentially futile, acknowledging the limits of his writing practice. Later in Part 1, Flanagan notes that “oblivion […] simultaneously prefigures and denies death” (5), suggesting that he sees his search for “beginnings” as leading him to oblivion—death and the resistance to death.

“Is it because we see our world only darkly that we surround ourselves with lies we call time, history, reality, memory, detail, facts? What if time were plural and so were we? What if we discovered we begin tomorrow and we died yesterday, that we were born out of the deaths of others and life is breathed into us from stories we invent out of songs, collages of jokes and riddles and other fragments?”

This quote establishes a key device that Flanagan deploys throughout the text. He is interested in cyclical time, inspired by the Yolŋu concept of the “fourth tense,” which can only be expressed in “fragments.” Question 7 is itself a series of fragments that aim to capture the concept of Memory, Understanding, and Forgiveness in a cyclical, plural time where events have happened, are happening, and will happen simultaneously.

“That kiss would, in time, beget death which would, in turn, beget me and the circumstances of my life that lead to the book you now hold, a chain reaction which began over a century ago, and all of which will lead to the unlikely figure of my father, unlikely in that he is to appear in a story with, among others unknown to him, H. G. Wells and Rebecca West.”

Flanagan draws inspiration for his text’s format from physicist Leo Szilard’s concept of a “chain reaction” wherein events trigger multiple other events in time. In this quote, he describes how one such initial action—a kiss between