When I was in Albania I saw an American professor made speechless by an audience question. Everyone in the audience who’d been to a US university was speechless too.

For reasons I don’t get, students in the USA are taught that the most important part of a speech is the questions after. (In Japan, this even caused an acquaintance of mine from the UK to say “here come the Americans” when a speaker asked the audience for questions and several people headed to the mics.)

The theory behind questions seems to be that the person asking the question will somehow be able to either 1) coax an interesting answer out of a boring speaker; 2) give the speaker a chance to expand on a point; 3) trap the speaker with a clever question.

Unfortunately, what usually happens is the the questioner

1) repeats part of the speech creating a “no shit, Sherlock” look on the face of the speaker:
Early in your speech, in the second paragraph in fact, right before you compared bananas to eagles, you said that apples are not oranges because they come from different trees and therefore are essentially different races of fruit…etcetera etcetera. (Eventually the questioner gets to a question heard by the handful of people still awake.)

2) attempts to show off intelligence by becoming incoherent and jargony:
Hobart’s stringent treatment of the relationship between the dialogic materialism of materiality and the linguistic construction of the cisgendered natural jouissance of the Bullcrappian critique of capitalist urmasculinity must be a model for future work in the field. What say ye?

3) attempts to trap a professional politician with a question the questioner thinks is original:
Isn’t it true that you and your actions were responsible for the crimes in Antwerp in 1997 that left 25 people dead and caused the collapse of the Belgian government and caused untold suffering in the Middle East? What say ye? (Politician’s answer: No. It isn’t true.)

(Author’s note: to the best of my knowledge, nothing actually happened in Antwerp in 1997.)

However, the question I heard in Albania was none of these. A Hemingway expert from Some University in the USA (not a real school) came to Albania and gave a lecture. The Albanians, hungry for something not on the official Communist reading list, crowded the small room.

To this day I don’t remember the subject of the lecture, although I do remember the professor was a nice guy and he was a friend of a friend. What I mostly remember is that one of our Peace Corps language teachers, a gentleman name Berti (the “e” has a long “a” sound as in “scare”) was called on to ask a question.

His question: How would your country be different if it had adopted Hemingway’s values?

We were all speechless, which is not normal for a roomful of academics. The question managed to be both different and topical. It was also simple to the point of being anti-academic and gave the professor a chance to shine.

Or it would have if he hadn’t been dumbstruck by the question.

He managed to mumble something about it being more manly or more macho or more people would go fishing and hunting or something and long for women who didn’t love them and then would get drunk and kill themselves with shotguns. (I might be misremembering that somewhat.)

After the lecture, I talked with my friend and the professor. He was in “I should have said” mode but he also knew he’d never get a question like that again. I knew I’d never hear a question that good again.