the overarching question

I’m in Saint Louis, Missouri, on an adventure. And when I told my friends about it, poet Perry Sams observed that both T. S Eliot and William S. Burroughs were born here. Yesterday that sprang to mind when I went on a pedestrian pilgrimage from where my traveling companions and I are staying to the majestic St. Louis Arch. Suddenly the passage from Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” superimposed itself on my closeup sight of the Arch: ” . . . To lead us to an overwhelming question . . .” And the Arch was telling me that such as question will be an overARCHING question as well.

The Arch communicates nonverbally. It may be asking if “What goes up must come down” is valid, or if a gleaming tribute to parabolas is its own reward, or if large-scale focal points of attention may enhance a global psyche. A true Overarching Question might endure over time and cultural change.

Reader, I invite you to ask your own Overarching Question. You have lived long enough to ponder and wonder. What question keeps you awake more than any other? What issue would make you happiest if resolved?

And I further invite you to imagine putting that question to the Arch Itself, just to see what happens. It costs nothing, and, who knows, the Arch may have something to convey. It certainly spoke to me, though not in words. And it made me smile.