Parabola's Fall 1988 issue: Questions What is it? I have been asking myself that question all my life, ever since I first became aware that after the long aureate day the sun inevitably goes away to the West. And with that going down of the sun would arise the lonely, aching, nostalgic longing that never failed to assail me. "There must be Something Else!" I would say, not aloud, not to any authoritative ear, for the tongue belonging to that ear, no matter how benignant, would never, I knew, speak the adequate word.    It was not more of what I had that I looked for, being filled full of what was given and what I myself imagined and fashioned. No. It was something totally other, another kind of world, perhaps, another way of being. The word "transcendent" might have fitted my need, could I have understood it. As it was, a knowing beyond my knowing evoked the equivocal question that neither expected nor asked for an answer. --from "Something Else" Cover: Abbey of Le Thoronet, France. Photograph copyright 1986 by David Heald. All rights reserved. In this issue:

• "The Crane at the Pond" by Eknath Easwaran
  - A life-or-death test from The Mahabharata
• "Beyond the Trap of the Mind"
  - A conversation between William Segal and D.M. Dooling
• "The First Question of All" by Richard Lewis
  - Children's questions
• "Something Else" by P. L. Travers
  - Thoughts on every man's personal search
• "Notes on the Koan" by Frederick Franck
  - Zen, Christian, and personal enigmas
• "The Question-raising Word of God" by John Navone
  - The role of questioning in Christian theology
• "The Sphinx" by P. D. Ouspensky
  - From A New Model of the Universe
• "The Kill Hole" by Linda Hogan
  - Mimbres pottery and other puzzles
• ARCS: "The Proof of Hard Questions"
• "At Issue" by Thomas A. Dooling
  - Questioning in the legal process
• "Heart Searching" by Martin Buber
  - God's first question to man
• "Who Is the East?" by Brian Swann
  - The riddle in literature and life
• "Quest and Questioning in a Waste Land" by James Karman
  - T. S. Eliot's retelling of the legend of the Fisher King

Tangents - Reviews

• "Easy Answers" by Philip Zaleski
  - A proliferation of books which simplify and confuse traditional teachings

Epicycles - Traditional stories from around the world

• "The Question" / Islamic
• "Tale of the Fish" / Sufi
• "Seven Impossible Questions" / German
• "Merlin's Doom" / England
• "The Unanswerable Rlddle" / Hindu