The Sower of Question Marks - Paperback

by Mark Eyskens (Author)

This book was born out of a long-standing frustration, due to the observation that a societal silence prevails on existential questions, which we dare not talk about even in our highly interconnected world. As if an embarrassment has seized our interlocutors, struck by a certain metaphysical prudishness as soon as conversation turned to talking about life and death, the meaning of our existence, or fundamental values and their divine or human origin. "Is there life after death?" and "Is there life before death?" are questions that I have never heard raised at the Parliament bar or in a waiting room of the university faculties. This book is the result of a reaction to the deficit of essential questioning at a time when digital and other forms of media inundate society. This writing is not a philosophical essay, nor is it a theological treatise, a sociological manual, a novel, a collection of poems. The truth is that it is all of these at the same time. Hence, the reader must browse the pages of this book with caution and prepare to encounter divergent intellectual landscapes planted with many question marks. Furthermore, since I will thoroughly discuss transcendence and what is hidden behind the visible and in the heart of the homo sapiens, I had to appeal to allegories, metaphors, images, and poetry. Three allegories emerge most forcefully: that of the homo interrogans, the blind monk and that of the palimpsest, three symbolic stories that try to unravel some signals of the mystery of being. The first concerns the discovery made by an expedition of paleontologists in Africa of an anthropoid skeleton that, thanks to the arrangement of the bones, was buried in prehistoric times in the shape of a large question mark. The second allegory is about a blind monk, who knows the contents of all the books in the library and is apparently a visionary. The third one is the story of the discovery of an old parchment in Jerusalem, an enigmatic palimpsest the decoding of which could upset the understanding of our human condition. Moreover, a certain professor J.C Mortal appears who can be considered as the spiritual twin of the author. "Life is a mystery to be lived and not a problem to be solved," the sage Mahatma Gandhi taught us. Yet in order to grasp the mystery, it is necessary to ask the right questions.