Questions are usually considered a healthy manifestation of the curious mind, but in my case there is a slight aberration: I ask way too many of them. Back in high school, my Chemistry teacher Mr. Gilmore recognised this problem early on. After enduring a couple of weeks of my insatiable barrage of interrogation, he famously forbade me to ask more than two questions per lesson.
If I were sticking to Mr. Gilmore's rule on this train ride, my two questions would have be the following:
1. If Leo Tolstoy were living today, do you think he would have a blog?
and
2. If so, would he post to this blog everyday?
Unfortunately Mr. Gilmore wasn't on the train to enforce his two question regime and so I wondered: What would Tolstoy's posts be like? Would they be entertaining stories, philosophical essays, or just factual lists of book signing dates? Would he be concerned about revealing plot or character ideas before they came out in a book? Would he be worried about revealing too many details about his personal life? Would he be on Facebook? If so, how many friends do you think he would have? Would he Twitter? And then I thought, all the same, Twitter might be going a bit far for Tolstoy.
But since we're talking of Leo's, what about Leonardo Da Vinci? Would he have a blog too? Would he post to it everyday? Would he be worried about posting his ideas before he had them patented, or would he be a more open source kind of guy? I mean, imagine what his website might look like!
I even started asking questions about my questions, like: Has anyone ever asked these kinds of questions before? If so, who asked them? Did they come up with any answers? What were these answers likely to be? And so on, and so on. You can see that Mr. Gilmore had a point.
Given enough time I could have probably gone on forever, wondering if Tolstoy would have a preference for Blogger or Wordpress, and whether Da Vinci would put those little Google ads on the side of his page in order to pay his hosting bills. Between the two, who's site do you think get the most hits?
"Ah, but isn't that enough questions already?" I hear you asking. Luckily for me (and anyone else reading this), train rides eventually come to an end.
