"Well, we come here to the Fastnesses mostly to learn what questions not to ask." "But you're the Answerers!" "You don't see yet, Genry, why we per… - Ursula K. Le Guin

To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.

"You don't see yet, Genry, why we perfected and practice Fortelling?"
"No..."
"To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question."

For in this love he now felt there was compassion: without which love is untempered, and is not whole, and does not last.

Before the gods and after, always, are the streams. Caves, stones, hills. Trees. The earth. The darkness of the earth.

He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men's acts, even the terrible became banal.