'The Result of Education Carried on By Curiosity'

“His curiosity was so pure it seemed almost childlike.” 

Vladimir Nabokov is describing his friend in exile, Iosif Hessen (1866-1943), and makes him sound like an extraordinary fellow. He continues in the obituary he wrote for his friend:

 

“He was living proof of the fact that a genuine person is a person interested in everything, including what interests others. Telling him anything was an extraordinary delight, since his engagement as an interlocutor, his very sharp mind, and the phenomenal appetite with which he consumed your rather unripe fruits transformed any trifle into an epic phenomenon.”

 

If we’re fortunate, we meet two or three such people in a lifetime. Their minds are forever sparking. Don’t confuse them with the social frauds who try to flatter you with feigned attention – the tilted head, the focused gaze, the empty questions indifferently posed. The absence of respectful curiosity kills conversation. Curiosity is not nosiness. The person I’ve met who most essentially embodies the sense of curiosity described by Nabokov is Guy Davenport, man and writer, who once wrote, “Curiosity, I'm convinced, is intelligence.” The man I spent several hours with was tirelessly curious and a tireless provoker of curiosity in others. He once said in an interview:

 

“My range of interests may be accounted for by my being 75.  It's really a very narrow range.  There ought to be a psychology that studies indifference, the `flat affect’ of non-response.  Response is, beyond the usual culturally-trained and biological reactions to the things of the world, the result of education carried on by curiosity.”

 

Davenport recalls Dr. Johnson in his Rambler essay of August 24, 1751:

 

“Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last; and perhaps always predominates in proportion to the strength of the contemplative faculties. He who easily comprehends all that is before him, and soon exhausts any single subject, is always eager for new inquiries; and, in proportion as the intellectual eye takes in a wider prospect, it must be gratified with variety by more rapid flights, and bolder excursions; nor perhaps can there be proposed to those who have been accustomed to the pleasures of thought, a more powerful incitement to any undertaking, than the hope of filling their fancy with new images, of clearing their doubts, and enlightening their reason.”

 

[Nabokov’s obituary for Hessen was published March 31, 1943 in Novoe russkow slovo (New Russian Word), a Russian-language newspaper in New York City. It is collected in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor (ed. and trans. by Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, 2019). The first sentence by Davenport is from “Fragments from a Correspondence” with Nicholas Kilmer, published in the Winter 2006 issue of Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics.]