A Discussion of Discussion

My inbox is papered with 250-word "discussion questions." Reading them is a reading assignment in itself. And as I tackle the question of whether by writing Robinson Crusoe Defoe meant to slyly advocate an England devoid of women, I wonder: are these the sorts of questions people realistically choose to dedicate time and pages to? Or are they spiralling higher and wilder, one from another, each hopping leapfrog style over another, and over, and over, into the vast gravity-less distance of Theories, in a quasi-hysterical quest to get a gold star? A text should have a certain gravity, that like our own comfortable pull has many useful functions to make up for its binding nature: it keeps our eyes on the page, even when they're sleepy; it keeps our thoughts weaving among its words and inky worlds; it keeps us, in short, much more than we keep it. This is what a good text does. And the consequence of a text with a strong centripetal force is that if we are reading properly, we should not be flung off into a space where our feet only flail and we have no inky branches to hold on to.