@mimi

Gertrude Stein was an interesting character. From the time I first heard of her, back in my 1970s "women's liberation" days, my sense of her was akin to what it feels like running your fingernail down a chalkboard. I suspect she was not an easy person to be around, although I don't think I am able to judge that as either a bad or good thing.

In any case, my comment about "reassuring" didn't refer to either Stein's life or her wiki page, but rather to the specific idea expressed in the quote, and relates back to your question ("Why is life so complicated to understand?") and, I believe, to Don's essay.

We humans seem to spend so much time and energy trying to figure things out. (Well, putting it in the first person, I certainly have done so. As a good friend of mine used to say whenever I started to get lost and stuck in overanalyzing things, "Centaurea, you think too much.") Life can be difficult and unpredictable, and we're on an overcrowded planet with a bunch of fellow human beings who are likewise difficult and unpredictable. I guess humans have a need -- maybe part of the need to feel safe and secure? -- to make it all make sense, and therefore more manageable.

A lot of humans are eternal seekers. Searching and seeking. The great mystery of life: "What does it all mean?" Because it's got to fit within some sort of belief system. Humans seem to need a belief system within which to operate, which provides the meaning, the questions and the answers, the framework for living. Sometimes an individual's personal belief system fits in with that of the prevailing culture, and sometimes it doesn't, which can be a darned challenging way to live.

I remember when I hit my forties and began to realize, at a gut level, that I wasn't going to live forever. I was aware of the problems in the world, the interesting and challenging things happening, and one of my regrets was that I wouldn't be around to see how it all turned out.

Twenty years on, and now in my early 60s, I know that "it" never "turns out". Life just goes on, one thing to the next, year after year, century after century. One way of being changes into the next, and so on. Belief systems come and go. Even if humanity devolves itself out of existence, something will go on without us.

So there is a part of me, at a deep level, that responds with a sense of relief to the idea that there is no "answer". A sense of space opens up, some breathing room to just be present. Ironically, it's in that open space that answers often arrive.

(And then the answers get concretized into a belief system, and away we go again.)

#3.1.2
You made me read Gertrude Stein's ...Wikipage. I didn't know her. So, this is the first time I heard about her. Her answer, you quoted, seemed to me a bit too simple and I am going to follow Don Mikulecki's advice to look at what appears to be simple a bit more carefully.

There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. There's the answer.
-- Gertrude Stein

So, I read about her ... and to my surprise found some answers ...
It says there ...among others ...

In 1941, at Faÿ's suggestion, Stein consented to translate into English some 180 pages of speeches made by Marshal Philippe Pétain. In her introduction, Stein crafts an analogy between George Washington and Pétain. She writes of the high esteem in which Pétain is held by his countrymen; France respected and admired the man who had struck an armistice with Hitler. Conceived and targeted for an American readership, Stein's translations were ultimately never published in the United States. Random House publisher Bennett Cerf had read the introduction Stein had written for the translations and been horrified by what she had produced.[109]

Although Jewish, Stein collaborated with Vichy France, a regime that deported more than 75,000 Jews to Nazi concentration camps, of whom only 3 percent survived the Holocaust.[6][110] In 1944, Stein wrote that Petain's policies were "really wonderful so simple so natural so extraordinary". This was Stein's contention in the year when the town of Culoz, where she and Toklas resided, saw the removal of its Jewish children to Auschwitz.[90] It is difficult to say, however, how aware Stein was of these events. As she wrote in Wars I Have Seen, "However near a war is it is always not very near. Even when it is here."[111] Stein had stopped translating Petain's speeches three years previously, in 1941.

Stein was able to condemn the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor while simultaneously maintaining the dissonant acceptance of Hitler as conqueror of Europe.[6] Journalist Lanning Warren interviewed Stein in her Paris apartment in a piece published in The New York Times Magazine on May 6, 1934. Stein, seemingly ironically, proclaimed that Hitler merited the Nobel Peace Prize.

(me: Well I think if that was supposed irony, it's in no way acceptable to make that remark, be it interpreted as irony or not. And the following two paragraphs just leave me baffled to say it gently)

"The Saxon element is always destined to be dominated. The Germans have no gift at organizing. They can only obey. And obedience is not organization. Organization comes from community of will as well as community of action. And in America our democracy has been based on community of will and effort.... I say Hitler ought to have the peace prize...because he is removing all elements of contest and struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic Left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace."[6][108][109][112]
Given that after the war Stein commented that the only way to ensure world peace was to teach the Germans disobedience,[113] this 1934 Stein interview has come to be interpreted as an ironic jest made by a practiced iconoclast hoping to gain attention and provoke controversy. (me: oh, oh, that reminds me of some Drumpfkopf). In an effort to correct popular mainstream misrepresentations of Stein's wartime activity, a dossier of articles by critics and historians has been gathered for the online journal Jacket2.[114]

How much of Stein's wartime activities were motivated by the real exigencies of self-preservation in a dangerous environment can only be speculated upon. However, her loyalty to Pétain may have gone beyond expedience.[109][114] She had been urged to leave France by American embassy officials, friends and family when that possibility still existed, but declined to do so. Accustomed to a life of entitlement since birth, Stein may have been convinced her wealth and notoriety would exempt her from what had befallen other European Jews. In an essay written for the Atlantic Monthly in November, 1940, Stein had written about her decision not to leave France: "it would be awfully uncomfortable and I am fussy about my food." Stein continued to praise Pétain after the war ended, this at a time when Pétain had been sentenced to death by a French court for treason.[6]

Author Djuna Barnes provided a caustic assessment of Stein's book, "Wars I Have Seen":

"You do not feel that she [Stein] is ever really worried about the sorrows of the people. Her concerns at its highest pitch is a well-fed apprehension."[90]
Others have argued that some of the accounts of Stein's war time activities have amounted to a "witch hunt".[7

hmm, I don't find her answers very reassuring at all.

Just saying. I have not the academic education to say something about her, but that Wikipage part of her bio I looked at carefully and I don't find it "reassuring" and the quote you gave in your comment I don't find reassuring as well. I don't say what I think about it though. We don't need moe controversy about it some seventy years later. And of course, it's not enough to read the Wikipage. So, this is just my spontaneous reaction to the fact that there are supposedly "no answers".

Peace.

@mimi

using the word "ain't".

#3.1.2
You made me read Gertrude Stein's ...Wikipage. I didn't know her. So, this is the first time I heard about her. Her answer, you quoted, seemed to me a bit too simple and I am going to follow Don Mikulecki's advice to look at what appears to be simple a bit more carefully.

There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. There's the answer.
-- Gertrude Stein

So, I read about her ... and to my surprise found some answers ...
It says there ...among others ...

In 1941, at Faÿ's suggestion, Stein consented to translate into English some 180 pages of speeches made by Marshal Philippe Pétain. In her introduction, Stein crafts an analogy between George Washington and Pétain. She writes of the high esteem in which Pétain is held by his countrymen; France respected and admired the man who had struck an armistice with Hitler. Conceived and targeted for an American readership, Stein's translations were ultimately never published in the United States. Random House publisher Bennett Cerf had read the introduction Stein had written for the translations and been horrified by what she had produced.[109]

Although Jewish, Stein collaborated with Vichy France, a regime that deported more than 75,000 Jews to Nazi concentration camps, of whom only 3 percent survived the Holocaust.[6][110] In 1944, Stein wrote that Petain's policies were "really wonderful so simple so natural so extraordinary". This was Stein's contention in the year when the town of Culoz, where she and Toklas resided, saw the removal of its Jewish children to Auschwitz.[90] It is difficult to say, however, how aware Stein was of these events. As she wrote in Wars I Have Seen, "However near a war is it is always not very near. Even when it is here."[111] Stein had stopped translating Petain's speeches three years previously, in 1941.

Stein was able to condemn the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor while simultaneously maintaining the dissonant acceptance of Hitler as conqueror of Europe.[6] Journalist Lanning Warren interviewed Stein in her Paris apartment in a piece published in The New York Times Magazine on May 6, 1934. Stein, seemingly ironically, proclaimed that Hitler merited the Nobel Peace Prize.

(me: Well I think if that was supposed irony, it's in no way acceptable to make that remark, be it interpreted as irony or not. And the following two paragraphs just leave me baffled to say it gently)

"The Saxon element is always destined to be dominated. The Germans have no gift at organizing. They can only obey. And obedience is not organization. Organization comes from community of will as well as community of action. And in America our democracy has been based on community of will and effort.... I say Hitler ought to have the peace prize...because he is removing all elements of contest and struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic Left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace."[6][108][109][112]
Given that after the war Stein commented that the only way to ensure world peace was to teach the Germans disobedience,[113] this 1934 Stein interview has come to be interpreted as an ironic jest made by a practiced iconoclast hoping to gain attention and provoke controversy. (me: oh, oh, that reminds me of some Drumpfkopf). In an effort to correct popular mainstream misrepresentations of Stein's wartime activity, a dossier of articles by critics and historians has been gathered for the online journal Jacket2.[114]

How much of Stein's wartime activities were motivated by the real exigencies of self-preservation in a dangerous environment can only be speculated upon. However, her loyalty to Pétain may have gone beyond expedience.[109][114] She had been urged to leave France by American embassy officials, friends and family when that possibility still existed, but declined to do so. Accustomed to a life of entitlement since birth, Stein may have been convinced her wealth and notoriety would exempt her from what had befallen other European Jews. In an essay written for the Atlantic Monthly in November, 1940, Stein had written about her decision not to leave France: "it would be awfully uncomfortable and I am fussy about my food." Stein continued to praise Pétain after the war ended, this at a time when Pétain had been sentenced to death by a French court for treason.[6]

Author Djuna Barnes provided a caustic assessment of Stein's book, "Wars I Have Seen":

"You do not feel that she [Stein] is ever really worried about the sorrows of the people. Her concerns at its highest pitch is a well-fed apprehension."[90]
Others have argued that some of the accounts of Stein's war time activities have amounted to a "witch hunt".[7

hmm, I don't find her answers very reassuring at all.

Just saying. I have not the academic education to say something about her, but that Wikipage part of her bio I looked at carefully and I don't find it "reassuring" and the quote you gave in your comment I don't find reassuring as well. I don't say what I think about it though. We don't need moe controversy about it some seventy years later. And of course, it's not enough to read the Wikipage. So, this is just my spontaneous reaction to the fact that there are supposedly "no answers".

Peace.