Why does it matter?

So what? Why does it matter? You can take hours on end to develop a paper, challenging a scholar's claims and developing your own. You can come up with a brilliant idea, revolutionary even. But so what? Why does it matter? A former professor told me that if you can't answer that question, nothing you do will matter.

The Last Lecture is a book that matters in a lot of ways on its own. It is written as the author's dying message to his children. Many people would be interested for that reason alone. But why does my analysis matter? Why does it matter that there are gaps between the video version of the lecture and the book version.

As I've been reading, this question has been occurring to me over and over. If the author's children someday viewed that lecture, they would see a bright, entertaining professor with a great sense of humor. They would never know that he was nauseous the entire speech from a recent chemo treatment. They would never know that he only finished editing his lecture a moment before it began. They would never know the battle he had with his wife (their mother) over giving the lecture in the first place. They would miss these key details, and so would we. To me, the book creates the human connection. It connects the has-it-together professor with the guy who is terrified out of his mind of cancer. You feel like you get to know the author, like you're standing right there on the stage with him. To me, this is the way. And this is why the gap matters.