'Something to Be Found Out'

If I had the right to design a friend, someone to possess all the qualities I most value in a companion, my first ingredient might be curiosity, an unapologetic interest in the world, in particular his fellow humans. I sense that many of our problems are caused by people afflicted with boredom coupled with pseudo-sophistication. Nothing impresses them, nothing rouses their interest or admiration. To feel something, they resort to anger. The chief motive for anger is that rush of power it lends an otherwise sluggishly indifferent person. Perhaps an unacknowledged component in curiosity is humility, an admission that we don’t know everything. Here is Desmond MacCarthy on Robert Burton (1577-1640), author of The Anatomy of Melancholy: 

“He was at any rate born with the most reliable prophylactic against tedium – consuming curiosity. This is the passion after all that the Universe is most obviously fitted to satisfy. His curiosity was not scientific in method; but one trait he had in common with men of science, he could be happy correlating phenomena.”

 

MacCarthy suggests that we have evolved to be curious, that our world is there for our “amusement” – perhaps the wrong word. “Understanding” might be preferable, or even “wonder” or “delight.” We are at home in precisely the right universe for us. No need to feel alienated. If we’re fortunate, we meet two or three people in a lifetime whose sensibilities are driven by curiosity for its own sake. It is its own reward. Such 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 virtue of curiosity is Guy Davenport, 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. There was never a lapse in conversation, even with me, a stranger he would never meet again. 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.”

 

The late Richard Wilbur delivered the commencement address at Lawrence University in 1960. Weigh his observations with the state of American curiosity in the twenty-first century:

   

“Still another virtue of the educated person is curiosity: the feeling that there is something to be found out, and that one perhaps can find it. There’s no need to say why curiosity is a good thing; and the quantity of research, discovery, and invention reported every year would indicate that we are still a vigorously curious nation.”

 

Wilbur mentions an unnamed Italian novelist who had recently visited the U.S.: “[H]e felt that the American intellectual class has lost the habit of adventurous general reading. . . . I'm afraid it's true that our educated people in general have ceased to have that breadth of curiosity which we remember in the Franklins, the Jeffersons, the John Quincy Adamses -- the great readers, lookers and tinkerers of an earlier America.”

 

And that was sixty-five years ago. Wilbur adds: “Too many of us have conceded the butterfly to the lepidopterist.”

 

[MacCarthy’s essay on Burton is collected in Portraits (1931), available at Isaac Waisberg’s IWP Books.]