I come from below.
When I finish this presentation, I’ll return back down…
In the meanwhile, I’ll stay within this area,
within this horizon.
This talk will be screen-free,
for you not entirely fee-free …
but I have difficulties to remember, what this thing is called.
We people are often limited by such boundaries
and sometimes we are looking for
some kind of a free way of our own alternatives.
But sometimes we’re glad to be shown our…
and I won’t say that word.
So, I think that the whole universe,
the whole cosmos experiences such tension
between the freedom and limits, between given boundaries.
When we were kids,
we even thought with similar boundaries;
that our world was a closed up place
there were few people, a couple of rooms, a couple of toys.
We were watching everything around us
and listening to the sounds of this world coming to us,
but most importantly, we were asking.
And this mouth open in wonder,
this opening with flowing energy,
this draught providing the flow of ideas,
the distribution of opinions,
urging the steady and stagnating things...
I think that this is the driving force of the universe,
the driving force of something that we can call
development, progress, etc.
When we were kids, we were not afraid to ask questions.
And I remember that one of my first questions was:
"Why is everyone dying and only I am immortal?"
Another, rather philosophical one was:
"How come it’s me?"
Then I’d gone through rather sceptical philosophical phase
when I asked myself:
"Is it really me? Am I not in fact our neighbour?"
"Am I not born some place else than I really should have been?"
Then other questions came and thus,
when I found out that I wasn’t immortal,
I asked what it’d be like when I’d grow up and die
and my soul would live on and I’d find myself in some space-time,
which we can call the eternity
and I asked myself again:
"Shan’t I be bored in that eternity?"
"What shall I do all that time?"
So, I guess all of us have been through such stage of questioning,
we have all experienced that.
And then, one day, suddenly we forgot to ask
and we started to go to schools,
to those producing tools and technologies,
which gave us answers,
and we found out that it is more convenient
to simply get the answers, rather than to seek for them
and ask for the reasons, consequences
and about all issues that make this world
such a complicated and beautiful place.
We are not the only ones asking
questions even as grown ups.
One of the greatest scriptures
of the world’s spiritual literature
– the Bible - asks in the first book,
the Book of Genesis, the question...
and I’m asking you now, whether you know who has asked it.
It’s been asked by God Himself,
When He created the world and did it in seven days.
And He did it imperatively without any doubts,
by some authoritative gesture…
And then, only after He had created a Man,
there came a time for God’s questions.
When He gave him free will and said
that he could use the whole creation to his benefit,
the Man sinned by curiosity and in that moment
the first question of the history was asked.
It was the first question of this time, of this human time,
when God exclaimed -
well maybe it was a cry, maybe just an exclamation,
but for me it was a question – He asked Adam:
"Where are you?"
So the first question was not asked by the Man,
it was put by God to a Man.
And as some kind of punishment or lesson,
the Man started to ask God this question:
"Where are you?"
And if you exist, why can’t I see you? Do you really exist?
So we can see that the questions we ask as children,
or philosophers, who can go nuts about it
(and some of them already have), are very profound,
even if they seem simple at the first sight.
Why something exists and why it rather exists than not?
That is a truly beautiful, almost esthetic question,
which opens up large philosophical room
and also gives us the possibility
to spend the rest of our lives
over this question in some sanatorium.
I’ve already mentioned the Old Testament
as a main scripture of Jewish religion,
so I can’t help myself telling you one old anecdote
about asking questions.
One old Jewish rabbi has been asked once:
"Why are you Jewish people such gadflies
that you have to answer all questions by counterquestions?"
Old rabbi had scratched his beard for a moment
and then said: "And why not?"
So to ask questions
is a privilege of mankind and of intelligence.
Sometimes I can see a question in the eyes of our dog:
"When are we going out?"
Or: "Is the dinner ready or what?"
But really, it is a privilege of man, of us, people.
I started to read books quite early
and I remember one children story by Gianni Rodari,
the author, who wrote “Gelsomino in the Country of Liars”
and other fairy tales…and one of them was a story,
which I liked the least at that age,
it was about some unsuccessful guy,
who did everything wrong way around
and when he was examined by the psychologists –
it was not described in the story in such detail,
but it was put in a storytelling manner –
they found out that, when he was a kid,
he asked wrong questions.
Like Alice, when she was falling down the rabbit hole,
if you remember the situation:
Alice is falling, she finds herself in different physics,
different time, she has time to think
and pick some stuff from those shelves
and she is asking such existential questions as:
"Do cats eat bats?"
And you can perceive it well from the Slovak translation too,
maybe even better than from English original,
when she starts to doubt:
"Do cats eat bats or do bats eat cats?"
So she exchanged the agent with the object
and someone can write his/her PhD thesis on this topic,
because it really denotes
that Lewis Carroll was not only a brilliant storyteller,
but he was also a philosopher
and that he’s been touching upon problems,
which are nowadays explored
by present astrophysics or some other disciplines.
I am a “Bookaholic”, which means that I am a book addict.
Someone is able to spend whole fortune on various liquids
and I can spend it all on books.
My whole carrier is put into book’s service.
And one day, I started to notice the questions
appearing in the books I was reading
and I found out that they appear in every book.
I haven’t read a book, which would not contain a question,
doesn’t matter if it was poetry,
fiction, philosophical essays, math articles…
there is always a question.
And I started to write these questions down
and today I’ve got 19865 questions
and they look like this when printed out.
And here, we’ve dared to cut the rest of these questions.
Imagine that the Earth is bombarded by different particles,
the physicist and astronomers would know more about it,
but, maybe, the universe is bombarded by our questions,
which we release towards it,
different kinds of questions.
Of course, I mean poetic questions, not like:
"What time is it?" Or: "When do we meet?"
For example: "It had been so beautiful between us,
why it had to be spoiled by love?"
"What does the verse preach?"
"How shall I make any sense out of this all?"
"What kind of world is this,
where everyone knows everything straight away?
Is it Hell?
Wittgenstein’s question:
"How did you learn the meaning of the word “three feet”?"
And last one for instance:
"What is the major theme of Apocalypse?"
As we have an exceptionally creative audience here...
I would like to ask you to put down
your question during the break.
And maybe I will add it to my collection of these questions.
I know that we, people, like to have answers in this world.
We like to complete things, we like it,
when something is doubtless, incontestable.
We love security; we love to put a full stop after everything.
But I’ll be always on the side of those
who’ll always put a question mark above that full stop.
Thank you…for your attention?