Americans don’t like questions like that. I don’t say that to condemn them. I say it, if anything, with empathy. I hardly blame them. They are difficult, painful, piercing questions to ask of one’s self. And yet it is the hallmark of a mature, confident society — just as it is a person — to be able to ask them, and laugh, not just through the pain, but or at the pain, or even despite the pain. But with a kind of happiness. Because the pain of self-revelation is precisely what contains all th…