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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Curiosity for a Cat1/20/2007 02:46:55In trying to be some kind of scholar or thinker, writer or maker-sharer of ideas, sometimes I lose track of my own curiosity. This is part of the process. When the writing begins, for anything at all to be sayable, at some point the doors of revelation need to close. Then I assemble my Positions and Points, my Assertions and Convictions. They become what is interesting and important, suddenly, and what I do know takes precedence over what I don't know. This is the way of being that scholarship sometimes expects. I am asked about my position and my interests. I am expected to be ever consistent, to be a system before I am human. All of this is for sensible enough reasons, though one can easily let it all get out of hand. A scholar and scientist is a baffoon without curiosity. When I lose curiosity I also forget the contingency of the whole universe (which is to say, how much we all need each other). I sound my opinions, avoid hearing how people respond to them, and since the universe of possible knowledge consists only of me, there is little to do but cultivate my own self-importance! But if I am good for anything, reading and writing all day, it is to keep an ear out for the undiscovered, assembled, and unarticulated. More, it is to be desperate for that. To need to know as if life depended on it because it does. Be careful to step down from madness, from scholarly messianism, that the next discovery or the correct interpretation will usher a wave of peace and equanimity. No thesis comes without its antithesis, in equal proportion. But there can be a gentle desperateness, one that is proper to the desperate human situation. And meanwhile patient. One that sees the other, not as answer to the dogmatic questions one already struggles with, but as the possibility for new question-answers that will dissolve the old worries on contact. Dissolution comes from looking to something outside, since the self is only known when it and the other are known. It is impossible to know only oneself. So in my studies I am trying to cultivate a practice of curiosity. It is hard, but I am trying. |
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