Value for Monday of Week 12 in the season of Sowing

Being Curious

Like buds on a plant, we begin to open ourselves through curiosity.

“Seek knowledge for its own ends.” . . . By allowing himself to be driven by pure curiosity, he got to explore more horizons and see more connections than anyone else of his era. [Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci, (Simon & Schuster, 2017), p. 520.]
I have no special talents. I am just passionately curious. [Albert Einstein]
Curiosity is the lust of the mind. [attributed to Thomas Hobbes]

“Curiosity is a basic element of our cognition . . .” “. . . satisfying curiosity, both among humans and other animals, is intrinsically rewarding, thereby serving to reinforce the investigative behaviours that led up to it.” “Both curiosity and wonder are considered important motivational factors for learning during early childhood (0–8 years).”

Curiosity is the act of leaning forward, motivated by wonder. “Historically, curiosity has often been referred to as the appetite for knowledge . . . and has been examined for its moral status . . .” “. . . increasing perceptions of ‘social usefulness’ regarding a scientific topic also increases curiosity and subsequent information search.” “. . . curiosity serves as a ‘common currency’ for exploration, which must be balanced with other drives such as safety and hunger to achieve efficient action.”

“Curiosity is associated with a number of beneficial outcomes, such as greater life satisfaction, more work engagement and better academic performance.” “Curiosity and curiosity-driven questioning are important for developing scientific thinking and more general interest and motivation to pursue scientific questions. Curiosity has been operationalized as preference for uncertainty . . . and engaging in inquiry-an essential part of scientific reasoning-generates high levels of uncertainty . . .”

Real

True Narratives

Helen is learning adjectives and adverbs as easily as she learned nouns. The idea always precedes the word. She had signs for small and large long before I came to her. If she wanted a small object and was given a large one, she would shake her head and take up a tiny bit of the skin of one hand between the thumb and finger of the other. If she wanted to indicate something large, she spread the fingers of both hands as wide as she could, and brought them together, as if to clasp a big ball. The other day I substituted the words small and large for these signs, and she at once adopted the words and discarded the signs. I can now tell her to bring me a large book or a small plate, to go upstairs slowly, to run fast and to walk quickly. This morning she used the conjunction and for the first time. I told her to shut the door, and she added, "and lock." She came tearing upstairs a few minutes ago in a state of great excitement. I couldn't make out at first what it was all about. She kept spelling "dog–baby" and pointing to her five fingers one after another, and sucking them. My first thought was, one of the dogs has hurt Mildred; but Helen's beaming face set my fears at rest. Nothing would do but I must go somewhere with her to see something. She led the way to the pump-house, and there in the corner was one of the setters with five dear little pups! I taught her the word "puppy" and drew her hand over them all, while they sucked, and spelled "puppies." She was much interested in the feeding process, and spelled "mother-dog" and "baby" several times. Helen noticed that the puppies' eyes were closed, and she said, "Eyes–shut. Sleep–no," meaning, "The eyes are shut, but the puppies are not asleep." She screamed with glee when the little things squealed and squirmed in their efforts to get back to their mother, and spelled, "Baby–eat large." I suppose her idea was "Baby eats much." She pointed to each puppy, one after another, and to her five fingers, and I taught her the word five. Then she held up one finger and said "baby." I knew she was thinking of Mildred, and I spelled, "One baby and five puppies." After she had played with them a little while, the thought occurred to her that the puppies must have special names, like people, and she asked for the name of each pup. I told her to ask her father, and she said, "No–mother." She evidently thought mothers were more likely to know about babies of all sorts. She noticed that one of the puppies was much smaller than the others, and she spelled "small," making the sign at the same time, and I said "very small." She evidently understood that very was the name of the new thing that had come into her head; for all the way back to the house she used the word very correctly. One stone was "small," another was "very small." When she touched her little sister, she said: "Baby–small. Puppy–very small." Soon after, she began to vary her steps from large to small, and little mincing steps were "very small." She is going through the house now, applying the new words to all kinds of objects. Since I have abandoned the idea of regular lessons, I find that Helen learns much faster. I am convinced that the time spent by the teacher in digging out of the child what she has put into him, for the sake of satisfying herself that it has taken root, is so much time thrown away. It's much better, I think, to assume that the child is doing his part, and that the seed you have sown will bear fruit in due time. It's only fair to the child, anyhow, and it saves you much unnecessary trouble. [Annie Sullivan, Letters, May 8, 1887.]

On curiosity:

Amir D. Aczel, Descartes’ Secret Notebook: A True Tale of Mathematics, Mysticism, and the Quest to Understand the Universe (Broadway, 2005).
Stephen Budiansky, Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel (W.W. Norton & Company, 2021): “From the age of 4, Gödel was known as ‘Herr Warum,’ or ‘Mr. Why.’ He would later tell a psychiatrist that he was “’lways curious, questioning authority, requiring reasons.’ He experienced this as a delight, not a burden: ‘The highest aim of my life (conceived in puberty) is pleasure of cognition.'”
Elisabeth Eaves, Wanderlust: A Love Affair With Five Continents (Seal Press, 2011): a biographical account of “the perpetual desire to move”.
John Breton Connelly, The Parthenon Enigma: A New Understanding of the World’s Most Iconic Building and the People Who Made It (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014): an inquiry into the origins and construction of a classic Greek structure, the book is “the exposition of a truly great idea, and a reminder of what a thrilling subject the past, that foreign country, can be.”
Wendy Lesser, Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014): “A literary work must be able to turn the quotidian into something strange.”
Edward Dolnick, The Seeds of Life: From Aristotle to da Vinci, From Sharks’ Teeth to Frogs’ Pants, the Long and Strange Quest to Discover Where Babies Come From (Basic Books, 2017). The discovery took place in an instant, from observing a sea urchin.
Simon Barnes, The Meaning of Birds (Pegasus, 2018): “ . . . a book of essays that explore the biology of birds and our abiding fascination with them.”
Bernd Brunner, Birdmania: A Remarkable Passion for Birds (Greystone, 2018): “ . . . a cultural history of the varieties of human ornithological obsession.”
Noah Strycker, Birding Without Borders: An Obsession, a Quest and the Biggest Year in the World (Houghton Mifflin, 2018): “ . . . a firsthand account of a serious case of birdmania”
Karen Olsson, The Weil Conjectures: On Math and the Pursuit of the Unknown (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019): “Olsson is evocative on curiosity as an appetite of the mind, on the pleasure of glutting oneself on knowledge.”
Jeff Sharlet, This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers (Norton, 2020): “Sharlet takes us to pockets of the world most of us will never see or bother to notice, and he has an unusual ability to find grace in everyone’s story, training his eye on those whom the rest of us avoid, either out of fear or a lack of curiosity.”
Toby Wilkinson, A World Beeath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology (W.W. Norton, 2020): “Wilkinson’s ambitious focus is the hundred years of Egyptology between Jean-Francois Champollion’s groundbreaking deciphering of the Rosetta stone in 1822 and Howard Carter’s sensational discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922.”
Tom Vanderbilt, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning (Knopf, 2021): “. . . a Writer Takes Up Chess and Surfing and Singing and Juggling and …”
Ellen McGarrahan, Two Truths and a Lie: A Murder, a Private Inveestigator, and Her Search for Justice (Random House): “McGarrahan’s obsession with rooting out the truth in the case leads her (and her unfailingly loyal husband) to Florida, Ireland and Australia, where she tracks down any detail that might potentially help her know what happened.”
Philip Hoare, Albert and the Whale: Albrecht Dürer and How Art Imagines Our World (Pegasus, 2021): “His biographical sections are both elliptical and redolent of entire lives.” The book is about how this Renaissance-era artist’s curiosity led him to imagine animals’ characteristics, then paint them.
Martin Edwards, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators (Collins Crime Club, 2022): “We read these stories as a form of entertainment and escapism, to match wits with a fictional detective, to enjoy the resolution of uncertainty or deliverance of justice not always afforded by the real world, to be shocked and exhilarated, but also ‘as a tool of recognition, a means of solving the puzzles of human nature, of understanding who we are.'”
Darryl Pinckney, Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022): “The memoir braids together Pinckney’s memories of (Elizabeth) Hardwick and her circle of New York intellectuals with his own coming-of-age story.”
Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Simon Garfield, All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopedia (William Morrow, 2023): “The most important service encyclopedias provide is establishing an infrastructure for expanding on what we know, tentative dirt roads that eventually connect to superhighways.”

The tawdry side of curiosity:

Bill James, Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence (Scribner, 2011).

Technical and Analytical Readings

Roger Wagner & Andrew Briggs, The Penultimate Curiosity: How Science Swims in the Slipstream of Ultimate Questions (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Perry Zurn, Curiosity and Power: The Politics of Inquiry (University of Minnesota Press, 2021).
Philip Ball, Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything (University of Chicago Press, 2012).
Susan Engel, The Hungry Mind: The Origins of Curiosity in Childhood (Harvard University Press, 2015).
Ilhan Inan, The Philosophy of Curiosity (Routledge, 2013).
Enrico Campo & Yves Citton, eds., The Politics of Curiosity: Alternatives to the Attention Economy (Routledge, ).
Stacey L. MacKinnon & Beth Archer-Kuhn, Reigniting Curiosity and Inquiry in Higher Education: A Realist’s Guide to Getting Started with Inquiry-Based Learning (Routledge, 2023).
R.J.W. Evans & Alexander Marr, Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Routledge, 2023).
Mark Zuss, The Practice of Theoretical Curiosity (Springer, 2012).

Photographs

Documentary and Educational Films

Particle Fever: “The film is a tribute to the creativity and curiosity that drive scientific research, which is shown to be an imaginative as well as an empirical pursuit.”

Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

You have been a child, reader, and you would, perhaps, be very happy to be one still. It is quite certain that you have not, more than once (and for my part, I have passed whole days, the best employed of my life, at it) followed from thicket to thicket, by the side of running water, on a sunny day, a beautiful green or blue dragon-fly, breaking its flight in abrupt angles, and kissing the tips of all the branches. You recollect with what amorous curiosity your thought and your gaze were riveted upon this little whirlwind, hissing and humming with wings of purple and azure, in the midst of which floated an imperceptible body, veiled by the very rapidity of its movement. [Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, or, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831), Volume I, Book Second, Chapter VII, “A Bridal Night”.]

"I don't know if you have ever thought what a rare thing flame must be in the absence of man and in a temperate climate. The sun's heat is rarely strong enough to burn, even when it is focused by dewdrops, as is sometimes the case in more tropical districts. Lightning may blast and blacken, but it rarely gives rise to widespread fire. . . The red tongues that went licking up my heap of wood were an altogether new and strange thing to Weena. She wanted to run to it and play with it. I believe she would have cast herself into it had I not restrained her. . .” [H.G. Wells, “The Time Machine” (1895).]

Novels:

Great mystery novels:

Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon: A Novel (1930).
Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time (1951).
Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987).
John le Carré, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1964).
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (1939).
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953).
Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (1937).
Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None (1939).
Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926).
Agatha Christie, Murder On the Orient Express (1934).
Agatha Christie, “The Witness for the Prosecution” (short story) (1925). (play manuscript)
Robert Traver, Anatomy of a Murder (1958).
James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934).
Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs (St. Martin’s Press, 1988).
Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal (1967).
John Buchan, The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915).
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1860).
Suzanne Berne, A Crime in the Neighborhood (1997).
Eric Ambler, A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939).
John Gregory Dunne, True Confessions (1977).
Mark Behm, The Eye of the Beholder (1980).
Scott Smith, A Simple Plan (1993).
Thomas Berger, Sneaky People (1975).
Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955).
Newton Thornburg, Cutter and Bone (1976).
Upton Sinclair, Dragon’s Teeth (1942).
Ann Arensberg, Sister Wolf: A Novel (1980).
Stuart M. Kaminsky, A Cold Red Sunrise (1988).
Stanley Elllin, The Eighth Circle (1958).
Dennis Lehane, Mystic River (2001).
Megan Abbott, Queenpin: A Novel (2007).
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch: A Novel (2013).
Yukito Ayatsuji, The Decagon House Murders: A Novel (1987; translated in Pushkin, 2021): the collective curiosity of the characters is their undoing.
Stephen Spotswood, Murder Under Her Skin: A Pentecost and Parker Mystery (Doubleday, 2021): “It’s a pleasure to watch them arrive at that knowledge after sifting through red herrings and peeling secrets back like layers of an onion, all while revealing even more of themselves without guilt or shame.”
Amity Gaige, Heartwood: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2025): “At the center of the story is Valerie Gillis, a nurse who goes missing in Maine during an audacious hike of the 14-state beast that is the Appalachian Trail.”
A list of 100 top mystery novels.

Novels, from the dark side:

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Chain-Gang All-Stars: A Novel (Pantheon Books, 2023): “To enjoy the action is to share in the guilt of the bloodthirsty fans sitting ringside at the live-broadcast death matches between prison inmates. Adjei-Brenyah is so good at writing fight scenes that our moral disgust never definitively stamps out the primitive thrill of reading them.”

Poetry

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Colin Davis was a conductor with “an intellectual curiosity stretching way beyond the bounds of the musical world”, and a matching penchant for musical exploration. “Determination and sheer labour allied to continuing musical curiosity came together in a man whose legacy is immeasurable. Whether in persuading audiences to return to the remoter corners of Berlioz or to Nielsen symphonies, or to revisit old friends like the Mozart operas with new ears, he succeeded in getting us not only to listen but to really engage.” He was the main subject of a 2012 documentary film. His musical curiosity is apparent from his wide-ranging playlists.

Imed Alibi is “a Tunisian percussionist with a curious mind”. To his native Tunisian sounds, his albums add jazz, Brazilian and Indian rhythms, bagpipes and synthesizer blasts.