'Curiosity to Inquire Into All Things'

“Concupiscence of experience, boundless curiosity to set our foot everywhere, to enter every possible situation. Montaigne.” 

I could have signed my name to that when I was twenty. I wanted to visit every country in the world, even the most dangerous. I made plans to move to Ireland – a naïve dream rooted in its writers -- Swift, Yeats, Joyce. I gave no thought to the practicalities of money and job. I had none, I was a student and not a very dedicated one, utterly unmarketable. I don’t recriminate myself. I wished to escape and postpone a dutiful maturity. A career as a reporter was a suitable surrogate, with plenty of adventure and tedium. I grew up.

 

The swashbuckling fantasy above is from Michael Oakeshott’s Notebooks, 1922-86 (ed. Luke O’Sullivan, Imprint Academic, 2014), dated 1955. That’s the way young people, especially men, grew up thinking – life as adventurous romance, fueled by Stevenson and Verne. In my case, the “boundless curiosity” remains, though more bounded. Adventure need not be joining the Foreign Legion or traipsing after Kerouac. It can be internal and even domestic. There’s no footnote to the Montaigne allusion, though Oakeshott often cites the Frenchman in his notebooks. Curiosity is a recurrent theme in the Essays and Montaigne doesn’t always approve. Often he associates curiosity with confusion and distraction, but not always. Take this from “Of the Education of Children”:

 

“Put into his head an honest curiosity to inquire into all things; whatever is unusual around him he will see: a building, a fountain, a man, the field of an ancient battle, the place where Caesar or Charlemagne passed.”