The Art of Curiosity and The Changing Routes to Casual Knowledge
In praise of things you vaguely remember
One of my greatest qualities (and probably the only one that I would ever publicly acknowledge) is my sense of curiosity. Curiosity has always seemed to me the highest of virtues and I tend to find that people with no sense of curiosity tend towards being some of the relatively few people with whom I tend to get along poorly. It’s perhaps fortunate then that most people have it to some degree or another, whether that’s the pursuit of informative knowledge, a love of gossip, or the beautiful idle curiosity that takes one down intriguing side-streets and those wonderful semi-mystical feeling countryside paths arched over with leaves and branches, hidden from the world.
I am just about of the age (as part of the last generation to hold this status) where I remember the days when the internet wasn’t a thing, and the curious had to rely on books of all things. I was a vociferous reader as a child, not as much reading books as inhaling them, usually several a week and far beyond those that were intended for me (I think I was in year two at primary school when they had to start asking me to bring my own books in because I’d read every book in the school, though to be fair it was a fairly small village primary school). These days I find much less time for them unfortunately, though I still indulge when I can and have joined the ranks of those with a stack of ‘to read’ books almost as high as them that keeps being added to. I’m currently working my way through some of the smaller ones on the pile in an inevitably futile attempt to reduce it.
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