'So Various, So Beautiful, So New'

It’s as easy to mistake curiosity for intelligence as it is to mistake nosiness for curiosity. Nosiness is the yearning to pry into the lives of others (the title of an excellent film about East Germany’s Stasi), hoping to uncover dirt. It’s a close cousin to gossip. True curiosity seeks knowledge and understanding for their own sake, and would seem to be the engine driving intelligence. The saddest of people are the inert, especially children. Some essential human quality, an engagement with the world, is absent. The second saddest are those who assume they already know everything and have the world figured out, so there’s no need to enquire further. 

As Dr. Johnson puts it at the start of his Rambler essay for March 12, 1751: “Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristicks of a vigorous intellect.” His next paragraph is a rousing paean to curiosity, a single sentence of 155 words:

 

“The desire of knowledge, though often animated by extrinsick and adventitious motives, seems on many occasions to operate without subordination to any other principle; we are eager to see and hear, without intention of referring our observations to a farther end; we climb a mountain for a prospect of the plain; we run to the strand in a storm, that we may contemplate the agitation of the water . . .”

 

I encounter the absence of curiosity even among engineering undergraduates. I spoke to one recently about the potential for quantum computing, a subject I know little about but that has, even to a layman, a gee-whiz quality. I had to write an article about it so I did some background reading and looked forward to hearing about his research.  I might as well have asked him to share his recipe for oatmeal. Monosyllables. No attempt even to feign interest. Further questions revealed a trait I find increasingly among students: careerism. This kid figured he could cash in by working in a discipline that, for the moment, is fashionable. A few years ago he might have taken up buckyballs. A quality some associate with the elderly – a clinical absence of curiosity; in short, inertness – thrives among certain students.

 

I remembered an essay Theodore Dalrymple published several years ago, “O, Brave Old World!” He describes meeting two nonagenarians embodying “continued pleasure in life.” One French woman is ninety and still reads four to five hours a day and is, when Dalrymple attends her birthday party, reading a biography of the Duc de Saint-Simon. She had recently attended a lecture devoted to the camouflage used by the French military during World War I. Dalrymple concludes:

     

“She spoke of all this with the pleasure of a young girl who had learned something completely new. No doubt a happy old age is largely a matter of luck, but it must also be partly a matter of attitude to the world, so various, so beautiful, so new.”