When am I happy and when am I sad and what is the difference? What do I need to know to stay alive? What is true in the world? Her mind traveled crooked streets and aimless goat paths, arriving sometimes at profundity, other times at the revelations of a three-year-old.

The passage frames consciousness as a restless, questioning force: happiness and sadness are not fixed states but problems to be examined, alongside more urgent inquiries about survival and truth. Morrison’s sequence of questions mimics a mind trying to build a usable philosophy from lived experience—what feelings mean, what knowledge keeps one alive, what can be trusted. The closing image (“crooked streets and aimless goat paths”) suggests thought as nonlinear wandering rather than orderly reasoning, capable of sudden depth but also childlike, disarming simplicity. The juxtaposition of “profundity” with “the revelations of a three-year-old” honors both: insight can arrive through sophisticated reflection or through naïve, elemental perception.