Sometimes There’s No Answer

In high school there was always an answer. It sat in the back of the textbook or in a folder on the teacher’s desk. Knowing it was there shaped how I thought. Every question had an answer. If two people disagreed, one of them just hadn’t found it yet. My job was to be the one who found it first.

This is the way I thought when I entered Yale in the fall of 1995.

On Columbus Day I was sitting in my dorm room when Randolph appeared in my doorway. Randolph was from Costa Rica, and he had a way of saying my name twice when he was excited, which was most of the time. “Rob, Rob. This is a great day.” Why are you so excited about Columbus Day, I asked. He shook his head. “No, no. It is El Día de la Raza.”

I’d never heard of it. He explained it on the way downstairs. In Latin America, October 12 wasn’t about the man or the conquest. It was the day two worlds met and a new people began, his people. He wasn’t against my holiday. He was inviting me to his.

His friends had gathered at the Women’s Table, the granite monument in front of Sterling Memorial Library. They were celebrating, people laughing in the dark with the library lit up behind them. One of them walked me through it. Why honor one sailor when you could honor everything that came after him, the entire mixed civilization most of a hemisphere actually lives in? I stood there feeling the particular thrill of a freshman discovering something entirely new that he’d never thought of. I had found a new answer, and it was better than the old one. I practically ran back to the dorm to share it.

Philip lived in the room next to me, on the fourth floor in entryway A of Lanman-Wright. He was from Chicago, Italian, conservative, and amused by nearly everything, especially his fellow freshmen arriving breathless with new truths. I told him about El Día de la Raza. He leaned back and told me about 1891. Columbus Day, he said, didn’t exist to celebrate conquest. It existed because eleven Italian immigrants were lynched in New Orleans and the holiday was America’s apology, the country’s way of saying Italians finally belonged. Strip the day from the calendar and you don’t erase Columbus. You erase a hundred years of immigrants clawing their way to a place at the table. He wasn’t angry. He was mock offended at best, enjoying himself. But the argument held. “Amazing,” I thought. I had learned something new again, and I needed to go tell the people celebrating El Día de la Raza what Columbus Day is really about.

So I ran back to the Women’s Table and told them about this new piece of information, explaining the true meaning of the day. But then they came back at me. They calmly told me what El Día de la Raza means to them. Nobody disputed the lynchings. They just asked why Italian pride needed this man in particular, and whether an apology to one people should come stamped on the anniversary of what began the destruction of another. They had answers for everything, the way Philip had answers for everything, and I felt the ground start to crumble under my feet.

After spending some time at the El Día de la Raza party, I climbed home to the fourth floor, trying to figure out the solution. Was it Philip, or was it Randolph? I started thinking that Randolph was right. You don’t owe a celebration to the man who started the killing. Then it was Philip, because the day was never about the man at all, it was about the people who needed it to mean something else. Then Randolph again on the landing. Then Philip again halfway up the next flight. I kept flipping each way. And somewhere on that last flight, I gave up. Not dramatically. Nobody saw it. I just stopped climbing for a second, and took a deep breath. There was no answer, and there was never going to be an answer. Both of them were right, but they were both right in different ways, which at the time I still couldn’t comprehend.

That lesson, that some things don’t have a clear resolution, turned out to be good preparation. We were in the common room on the fourth floor standing around discussing the deep philosophical questions in life. People were talking about all the things they had learned and trying to teach each other important life-changing concepts, and then we hit the mother of all unanswerable questions. Someone asked, “How are we here?” Everything we know insists that everything has a cause. Matter can’t be created or destroyed. And yet here we are. It’s a fundamental paradox, with absolutely no resolution.

In memory of Randolph Cardona, who passed away in 2020.

Appendix: The Prime Mover

I came across the best answer to this problem for me many years later, in the book A Prayer for Owen Meany. In it, Owen had underlined a passage from Thomas Aquinas. Everything that moves is moved by something else, and the chain can’t run backward forever, so something had to start it. “Therefore, there must be a first mover existing above all—and this we call God.”