top of page

Richard Flanagan's Question 7


Question 7 by Richard Flanagan

A koan seems like an unanswerable question but in Zen practice it is one that you may return to over an over in an attempt to gain enlightenment, or at least something akin to it.

I spent 6 days at a retreat in Byron answering one given to me by my teacher; 'Who are you?'.


It wore me down to my essential juices, blood and bones, mind and matter. In the end I realised that I was the sum total of all of my experiences to date and that I knew nothing except the present moment. I am still pondering the question.


In Question 7, author Richard Flanagan asks many such questions;


"What if time were plural and so were we? What if we discovered we begin tomorrow and we died yesterday, that we were born out of the deaths of others and life is breathed into us from stories we invent out of songs , collages of jokes and riddles and other fragments?"


Question 7 takes its title from a tale by Russian short-story writer and playwright Anton Chekov in which he asks “who loves longer, a man or a woman". Flanagan adds "And why do we do what we do to each other?"

 

In order to answer it I read the book twice and listened to Flanagan read the audio version of it too. But I still couldn’t find an answer. Is it who finally lives longest? Or is it who is illuminated in life brightest by those who are dead? Ahead of his visit to the Byron Writers Festival, I asked Richard where he landed with it?



Flanagan had an undiagnosed hearing problem when he was a kid that led him to enter “that strange nether world of isolation and pain ..… that took me into the world of the written word where I found ease and joy. I found myself on the page, not as one but as many.”


And many are the individuals and interwoven threads of this book. It is Flanagan's origin story writ large over a century. He explains how he only exists because his father was released after 4 years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp after the Allies dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The creation of this weapon of mass destruction only occurred because a Hungarian Jewish scientist called Leo Szilard who was a student and friend of Einstein’s, had read H.G. Well’s “confused” 1914 post-apocalyptic novel The World Set Free, in which Wells first mentioned the atomic bomb, 32 years before it was actually dropped. And Wells, Flanagan posits, only wrote his novel because he was afraid of love.


H.G. Wells novelThe World Set Free

Wells was 46 at the time and terrified by the explosive passion of 19 year-old Rebecca West, a self-styled literary critic who disdained Wells's work prompting him to invite her over for tea and .... a kiss. Despite being a ferocious womaniser, Wells couldn't cope with West's subsequent flaming desire so he fled from his wife Jane and his 21 year old lover Amber Reeves to his mistress Elizabeth von Arnim at her chateau in Switzerland, taking with him the atomic physicist Frederick Soddy’s book on radium which provided “a vista of hope" for him.  


Two decades later Leo Szilard fled Germany for England foreseeing what was ahead for Jews like him. After re-reading Wells' book he realised that Hitler could get his hands on this destructive technology. He persuaded his former teacher and friend Albert Einstein to write a letter to President Roosevelt encouraging urgent research into the atomic bomb by America in order to deter the maniacal Fuhrer. Szilard didn't want to be a destroyer of worlds. And while working on the technology, he consistently warned against it. But despite his best efforts, he wasn’t heeded.


The suffering of the dead illuminates the living” 


Apart from Szilard, and HG Wells, Flanagan's key historical characters include Thomas Ferebee, the man who pulled the lever and said ‘Bomb Away’. Seconds later his body lit up like a neon tube and his fellow aviators wondered if they would ever be able to have children.


In 1961, the Russians exploded a much larger bomb in the Arctic. 3,300 times more powerful than Hiroshima, it was detonated at only half the blast power of which it was capable. Watching the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans flaunt their atomic bombs in phalanx of goose-stepping soldiers, one wonders if humanity can contain its tendency towards global nuclear proliferation? It's a strange human death wish. How will it all end in the age of climate chaos?


“Now that world we oddly disdain as the non-human - as though we are somehow separate of it - is vanishing. And with it, unnoticed, a different, larger way of being human than that propounded by western art and thought. Could it be what is being lost with that world is us?"

Author Richard Flanagan

Flanagan ponders the loss of the intricate natural world around him. As a staunch Tasmanian he also reflects on the impact of the state's genocidal history. All Australians have this bloody, apocalyptic colonial history to contend with. It is part and parcel of who we are. Perhaps when we do eventually have our Truth, Voice and Treaty, we might treat the land and each other with more respect?


Reflecting on his childhood in Rosebery on the west coast of Tasmania, surrounded by wild seas and the forest of Tarkanya, he writes; “If we were to rise above it, above the mountains, and the island at the end of the world in which they sit, would we be able to see advancing from another direction Western time - with its insatiable greed and its monstrous appetite, Western time with its new machines, western time that will shortly dam the rivers and gobble the rainforest - would we see all that, and with it the coming reign of those promoting infinite theft from a infinite world?”


Another unanswerable question. But if we could, Flanagan imagines that; “We will have arrived back on Well’s time traveller’s dying beach, alone, in a dimming twilight.”


Richard Flanagan will be at the Byron Writers Festival Aug 9 - 11.





Subscribe to Nell's newsletter

Learn about upcoming events, interviews and more.

Thanks for subscribing. We'll be in touch soon.

  • White Facebook Icon
  • White Twitter Icon
  • White Instagram Icon
  • White YouTube Icon

© 2024 Nell Schofield

bottom of page