Curiosity: Alberto Manguel celebrates our spirit of inquiry

This is a book about the pleasures of reading and the lifelong journey of discovery literature takes us on.

Detail from Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (1590) by Theodore de Bry.

One of the words we repeat most often as children, at times to the exasperation of our parents, is why. The questions children ask can be difficult to answer, and whatever response we offer is likely to lead to further questions, as if asking why were as much about prolonging the pleasures of conversation as getting to the bottom of something. I have always been fascinated by the way in Italian the word for why, perche, is also the word for because. It seems to confirm that question and answer are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have a question without desiring an answer, but each answer inevitably leads to new questions. On her deathbed, Gertrude Stein is reported to have lifted her head and asked: ‘‘What is the answer?’’ When no one spoke, she smiled and said: ‘‘In that case, what is the question?’’

Argentinian-born Canadian writer Alberto Manguel is the author of numerous works of literary nonfiction including A History of Reading. Each of the 17 chapters of his latest book, Curiosity, has a question for a title, such as “Where is Our Place?”, “What is Language?” and “Who am I?” These are big questions, but don’t expect answers. For Manguel each query is like a magical door opening on to a world of continually forking paths. This is a book about the pleasures of reading and the lifelong journey of discovery on which literature takes us.

To be curious is to be open to the world. If, as adults, we stop asking why and retreat into ourselves, then we are only half alive. GK Chesterton once wrote, ‘‘How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure.’’ There was a time when the word curious meant careful rather than inquisitive. Perhaps there is still a link between these two meanings. Being open to the world is not easy and requires a certain diligence. Without firm answers on which to rest our feet, we must live in a state of uncertainty similar to Keats’s “negative capability”. Indeed it’s not a surprise that another archaic meaning of curiosity is anxiety.

Manguel equates curiosity with a nomadic impulse. It drives the artist, the scientist and the explorer. The space probe that landed on Mars was called Curiosity. Its embodiment is Tennyson’s poem Ulysses and the line, ‘‘To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield’’. Readers might recall Judi Dench quoting it in the Bond film Skyfall, but it’s debatable whether 007 and the security services should be held up as heroes of curiosity. After all, curiosity also killed the cat.

If Manguel celebrates our spirit of inquisitiveness he is also aware of stories in which individuals overstep the boundaries of knowledge. It is interesting that the punishment for the excessive curiosity of Eve and Pandora, and for building the Tower of Babel, was not meted out to individuals alone but had consequences for the whole human race. In modern times we are only too aware of the destruction of the natural world and indigenous cultures and populations that followed in the wake of Europe’s curious colonial explorers.

Given Manguel’s metaphor of the journey to describe curiosity, it is not surprising that his guide is Dante, and that the Divina Commedia provides a structure to each chapter. Dante has generated more secondary material than any other author, beginning with his two sons, Jacopo and Pietro, who both wrote commentaries on their father’s work.

Manguel is careful to state that this is not yet another book about Dante. He writes that ‘‘every reading is less a reflection or translation of the original text than a portrait of the reader, a confession, an act of self-revelation and self-discovery’’. The Commedia is one of those rare books that ‘‘appears to be inexhaustible yet at the same time concentrates the mind on the ­tiniest particulars in an intimate and singular way’’. Like questions, great works of art are things we never get to the bottom of, but return to like touchstones. I have taught Dante regularly to university students over the past 15 years. Each time there are passages that ask new questions of me, and lines that still give me goose bumps.

It is often said that Dante is an encyclopedic poet. Our model for the encyclopedia today is Wikipedia — a mass of provisional material, open to multiple voices and revisions. Like our universe, it is ever expanding. The Commedia is different because there everything fits into a unifying order. Eugenio Montale famously described it as a web, but he wasn’t thinking of the internet. Part of our fascination with Dante in recent centuries is the nostalgia for a web as children commonly draw a spider web: with a centre and a single begetter.

Dante is a concentric poet whose masterpiece expands out from a core vision. For this reason modernist authors such as Montale and TS Eliot liked to say that it would be impossible to rival Dante. Our world does not allow for more than fragmentary pieces of a puzzle.  Great works of literature continue to ask questions of us. In reading them, the curious reader is conversing with the past. But as Manguel writes, our educational institutions, interested in little else than financial profit, rarely foster thinking and imagination for their own sake. ‘‘Schools and colleges have become training camps for skilled labour instead of ­forums for questioning … universities are no longer nurseries for those inquirers whom Francis Bacon, in the 16th century, called ‘merchants of light’. We teach ourselves to ask ‘how much will it cost?’ and ‘how long will it take?’ instead of ‘why?’.’’

Manguel has written a book that admirably defends the importance of imagination against such economic rationalism, and prods our curiosity to keep asking why.

Simon West is a poet and Italianist. He is an honorary fellow at the University of Melbourne.

Curiosity

By Alberto Manguel

Yale University Press, 392pp, $44.95 (HB)