THE HISTORY OF CURIOSITY
God, wrote Augustine in Confessions, “fashioned hell for the inquisitive.” Ever since, curiosity has struggled to gain favor. “Curiosity” started a synonym for “fastidious,” note the editors of the journal Common-place in a special issue on curiosity and curiosities in history. “Now, to be curious is to seek knowledge, but that knowledge, because acquired through curiosity, can been seen as illicit,” they write. “It is a virtue to be curious, but curiosity killed the cat, and left Curious George locked up at the zoo.” Still, curiosity is the engine of discovery, both minor and marvelous. As the editors put it: “Curiosity links a world of ideas with the social worlds in which men, women, and ideas circulated.”
Common-place‘s collection of curiosities includes articles on the decline of Old Curiosity Shops, the connection between curiosity and cartography, and how curiosity drove the study of sleepwalking. Noting that “men and women who are curious are themselves sometimes turned into curiosities,” the editors introduce articles on an 18th Century man who became a celebrity for evidently changing races and a 19th Century missionary surgeon who presented portraits of patients’ tumors.
The issue is mostly devoted to these kinds of spectacles, equating “curiosity” with “exotic object of attention” rather than the more general quality of being inquisitive about the world. It should be noted that the latter takes on particular importance today as an antidote to commercial culture, which eschews contemplation and elevates our acquisitive impulses above our analytical ones. Although the editors do not put it this way—nor do they mention the Yiddish word luftmensch, meaning “an impractical contemplative person having no definite business or income”—it is heartening when they conclude their introduction with this Yiddish proverb: “[One] should go on living, if only to satisfy his curiosity.”
Related: Curiosity as the root of learning and journalism, from NBierma.com
PLACES & CULTURE
From Sports Illustrated:
Part tournament, part powwow, part youth festival, part cultural showcase, the annual Lakota Nation Invitational … in Rapid City, South Dakota, defies nutshell description. At its heart it’s a highly competitive 16-team high school boys’ basketball tournament—and starting this year, a 16-team girls’ tournament as well—made up mostly of schools from the state’s nine Lakota reservations. There’s also a wrestling tournament [and] three competitions that test students’ knowledge in general academics, Lakota culture and the Lakota language … The LNI’s most spectacular moment is … the Grand Entry under the spotlights in the Civic Center on Friday night. Tribal chiefs and ceremonial dancers don headdresses, hairpipe (bone) vests, leather pants and moccasins and, moving to a drumbeat, lead the athletes and other participants in a colorful procession around the hardwood before the semifinals. By incorporating ceremonies such as this, LNI organizers have helped revive interest in the Lakota Nation.
Many years have passed at Dodgertown since a Dodgers player last ate mess hall grub off a Navy-issued, trisected metal serving tray or climbed trees to avoid the night watchman enforcing curfew. At the team’s spring training camp in Vero Beach, Fla., however, time … flutters like a soft breeze through the azaleas, palmettos, royal palms and scrub pines in a baseball training facility disguised as an arboretum. … Dodgertown [is] otherwise known simply as Vero or colloquially as “the base.” Indeed, the tract served as a U.S. Naval air base before the Dodgers moved their spring headquarters there from Havana, Cuba, in 1948 … to train all of the organization’s players in the same complex. … More than 600 players moved into what were built as temporary barracks for servicemen and included wood-plank flooring and three bunk beds to a room. Dodgers of the ’50s and ’60s were awakened at six each morning by a shrill whistle, hustled to the mess hall to eat breakfast off their metal trays, then drilled on fundamentals all day.
WEEKLY DIGEST
• The four Blaylock sisters—ages 100, 98, 90 and 83—are remarkable; all have surpassed their life expectancy, none has lost her hearing, none has Alzheimer’s. “The four women fell easily into the same roles that have probably characterized their relationships since President Harding held office,” the New York Times Magazine reported from the Blaylocks’ recent joint birthday party. “Living to 98, it appears, does not provide immunity from the ministrations of a know-it-all older sister.” But as amazing as the Blaylocks are, America can expect to hold more birthday parties like theirs in the decades ahead, the Times said. The number of centenarians nationwide will jump from about 70,000 now to at least ten times that by 2050, researchers predict, as baby boomers grow older and scientific advances slow the aging process. About one in 20 baby boomers will live to be 100, and some will join the growing ranks of supercentenarians by reaching 110. Among the questions this raises, said the Times: “How will the foreknowledge of an extra 15, 20 or 30 years shape the pacing of the lives that precede them? Fullstory
Earlier:New York City’s growing centenarian population (fourth item)
• As the number of female centenarians does swell, chances are many of them will be living together. Or so a New York Times front-page story suggested late last month. The article profiled single older women who live with friends, saying oh-so-delicately: “The friends-helping-friends model for aging is gaining momentum among single, widowed or divorced women of a certain age.” The fact that women outlive men, are less eager than men to marry or re-marry in later stages of life, and have recently enjoyed an unprecedented amount of power and independence in society make this a growing trend, the Times reported. Fullstory The piece ran the week after the final episode of the HBO series Sex and the City, which, despite the show’s effort to celebrate singlehood, must have unsettled single viewers by pairing each of the four main characters with a male romantic interest.
Related: The growing no-kids movement, from the Boston Globe Magazine
Earlier:Business Week on Unmarried America (second item)
• The parting of the Red Sea looked especially surreal in the The Ten Commandments, long before the days of decent special effects (can you imagine that scene if the makers of The Perfect Storm got their hands on it?) But Russian mathematician Naum Voltsinger has taken pains to demonstrate that the actual phenomenon of the Red Sea crossing was in fact quite natural—though no less marked by the fingerprints of God. In a report called “Modelling of the hydronamic situation during the Exodus” published by the Russian Academy of Sciences, Voltsinger and colleague Alexi Androsov found that in the Gulf of Suez, “certain tidal conditions combined with a steady wind speed of 30 metres per second could have exposed the hidden reef under the sea for about four hours, allowing hundreds of thousands of frightened Jews to march to safety across the tongue of raised seabed.” “This shows that God rules the world through the laws of physics,” Voltsinger told The Scotsman last month. “The situation itself is physically explainable, and it happened. … The divine miracle is that the Jews arrived at the water at the moment they did.” So was Moses just idly pointing to the phenomenon when he stretched out his staff? Full story
• One ancient triumph of physics was the catapult. You could call it the original weapon of mass destruction, said the New York Times ‘ Science page last month. “It was the heavy artillery of that day, the sturdy springboard that shot menacing payloads over fortress walls and into enemy camps.” Now, said the Times, scholars are taking an interest in catapults as political instruments in ancient arms races. Historians are learning that as of 200 B.C., catapults were built according to careful calculations, and the mathematicians behind them were handsomely compensated by rulers who appreciated their political importance. Leaders also appreciated the concept of mutual deterrence, says one historian. “You didn’t just have to have catapults to use them. You needed your potential enemy to know that you had catapults.” Excerpt of story
Related:Why the Arab world once esteemed its scholars but no longer does, from the Chronicle of Higher Education
• Whether studying catapults or cathedrals, the artifacts and stories of history are “windows on truth,” wrote John Witte, Jr. recently in First Things, in a beautiful essay called “Confessions of a Christian Historian.” Witte opens with his reflections on the Frauenkirche in Dresden, a domed church that once hosted one of Bach’s finest organ concerts but was fire bombed during World War II. Witte witnessed the meticulous brick-by-brick restoration of the old church, and now writes, “The story of the Dresden church is a metaphor of life. Construction, destruction, and reconstruction. Work, judgment, and purgation. Birth, death, and resurrection. Creation, fall, and redemption. These are the stages of life. These are the passages of faith.” As a “source of revelation” and “collection of wisdom,” Witte writes, “human history cannot be fully understood without reference to this divine mystery.” Full story
Earlier:The folly of writing history without God (second item)
• Updates: My article on the prison system in the Jan./Feb. issue of B&C began by saying that the United States has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. Last month the Chicago Reader‘s Cecil Adams provided a very helpful analysis of how the U.S. compares with other nations with high prisoner populations. … Since my blog on work and motherhood, major articles on the topic have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and New Yorker, and Catherine Wallace’s Selling Ourselves Short was reviewed as a B&C Book of the Week.
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Nathan Bierma is editorial assistant at Books & Culture.
