Too little
Collecting labels
Interesting. What is it called? Next stall.
A name closes the encounter before understanding begins.
Curiosity
The souvenir has a perfectly ordinary job.
A settled desire to understand rather than remain content with unexamined assumptions.
Curiosity is a desire to understand that gives an unfamiliar thing a fair chance to interest you. Traveling, it can move you beyond identifying, photographing and acquiring. An answer may make a place less exotic and more intelligible. That is a discovery too.
Curiosity gives understanding beyond the souvenir
At a market, you admire a mysterious little implement. It would look magnificent on a souvenir pedestal. The seller shows you how it squeezes a lemon. Suddenly it belongs to a kitchen rather than to your collection of mysteries. Ask about its use, if the seller has time. You may leave with no purchase and a better question about the ordinary lives around you.
Finding the balance in Curiosity
An illustrative everyday situation
Ask a willing market seller how an unfamiliar kitchen implement is used before treating it as an exotic collectible.
A fitting response
Following a question
Could you show me what this does?
An invitation lets the person decide whether and how to explain.
Pursued too far
Demanding a performance
Tell me your whole story; I came to learn.
Your interest becomes an unpaid assignment for someone else.
An ordinary explanation can be more interesting than an exotic guess.
When the situation changes
If the stall is busy or the seller declines, look for a public demonstration, a museum account or another willing source. Interest does not create a claim on someone’s time.
What Curiosity makes possible
You can discover why a tool has that shape, why a street takes a turn, or why a public celebration matters. Understanding remains partial; one answer does not make you an authority on a whole community.
Curiosity in ordinary life
A familiar-looking building
Before deciding that a building serves the same purpose as one at home, read its public description. Notice the difference your first glance missed.
The trip near home
Visit a public place you usually pass. Find out one thing about its current use, including whose work keeps it going. Novelty need not require distance.
Nearby virtues, different work
Humility
Humility accepts that your first account may be wrong; Curiosity supplies a question worth pursuing.
Discretion
Discretion respects what is not yours to ask about or repeat. Curiosity must leave private lives private.
Curiosity and its counterfeits
Counterfeit: Exotic collecting
Treating someone’s daily life as an amusing specimen can imitate Curiosity. Genuine interest lets their explanation alter your categories.
Counterfeit: Interrogation
Persistent personal questions can masquerade as interest. Genuine Curiosity accepts that a person may prefer not to explain.
How to cultivate Curiosity
Begin with one specific question about something publicly offered for discussion.
Listen long enough for the answer to change your next question.
Notice what remains uncertain rather than expanding one encounter into a general claim.
Try it today
Use public information and willing exchanges. Nobody owes a visitor access to personal, sacred or confidential matters.
Choose an unfamiliar object, public sign or practice. Consult its explanation or ask a willing person one bounded question. Accept a short answer or a refusal.
While visiting an unfamiliar place
Let an unfamiliar thing become a useful question.
Questions worth returning to
What did I expect before I asked?
Did the answer change the question, or only decorate my first impression?
Keep the practice proportionate
Use public information and willing exchanges. Nobody owes a visitor access to personal, sacred or confidential matters.
About these practices · DisclaimerQuotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
As in travelling, the keeping of a journal excites to many useful inquiries that would not have been thought of had the traveller only determined to see all he could see, without ever asking himself for what purpose.
Her journal makes observation purposeful. The market question likewise seeks understanding beyond merely seeing more.
I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, ’Tis all barren;—and so it is: and so is all the world to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers.
Yorick challenges a traveler who finds everything barren. His metaphor encourages receptive interest, without blaming someone for not enjoying a trip.
Over such trivialities as these many a valuable hour may slip away, and the traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or the corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it.
Forster gently unsettles the prescribed cultural itinerary: the people and sky can prove more memorable than the expected lessons.
Each day he puts down in his note-book all the words that I use that he does not quite understand, and in the evening brings them to me and puts down their meaning and spelling with their Japanese equivalents.
Bird describes her interpreter Ito’s deliberate language learning. Curiosity belongs to the person explaining as well as to the visitor being guided.
And, since I must publish my whole shame, ‘tis not above a month ago, that I was trapped in my ignorance of the use of leaven to make bread, or to what end it was to keep wine in the vat.
Montaigne admits not knowing the ordinary use of leaven. A practical question can reveal more than the performance of worldly sophistication.
But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever.
Elizabeth allows for continuing discovery in familiar people. Travel curiosity can survive the first interesting impression.
Nay, to make plainer what I have in mind, this same woman has a share of the higher and more poetical understanding, frank interest in things for their own sake, and enduring astonishment at the most common.
The essay recognizes sustained interest in ordinary things. Asking what a simple market tool does can be a fuller curiosity than searching only for marvels.
Continue exploring
Take these ideas into everyday life
Read freely, follow the fifteen-virtue program, or adapt this collection in My Virtues. A local outing can be enough.