Curiosity And A Feline Christ

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Curiosity And A Feline Christ

If it’s true curiosity killed the cat, then I suggest we revere that cat as a sort of Christ-figure who died so that we may experience the glory of curiosity in all its bookstore-hopscotching endless-Wikipedia-loop-inspiring glory. Thanks, cat. Because of you I can buy records by the people who influenced the people whose records I already liked, and to go back and back and back like that until I find, not the “source,” exactly, but a sort of vista from which I can see just how much great stuff there is and how endless and wonderful the search is going to be, and do all that without worrying that I’m going to fall from the vista and gore myself on a pile of broken, jagged CDs.

No one throws out “curious” as a self-descriptive adjective when they are trying to be impressive, but I think they ought to. You don’t see “curious” in a whole lot of dating profiles unless it’s proceeded by the prefix “bi-” which, good for you, but it’s not exactly the kind of curiosity I’m describing here.

“Impulsive” is usually a shoddy back-justification for irresponsibility, selfishness, or actual instability.

“Nerdy” pretty much just means “I like the same twelve things everybody else likes” when at one point it maybe meant a curious, all-consuming approach towards culture. Even “smart” as a self-descriptive adjective has really just come to mean “I like the things I am told smart people like, and I while I actually am smart myself, SEEMING smart is even more important to me than BEING smart.” It sort of comes down to toting the book around to be seen toting the book around versus toting the book around so you can enjoy it, finish it, and start toting around another one, and another one, and another one.

“Curious” is a lifestyle, if you will allow me to sound like a shoe commercial for one second. It’s a journey, not a destination, as long as I am going to be sounding like a shoe commercial in order to say things I actually mean. It’s not checking things off the list. It’s writing the list and realizing there will never, ever be a piece of paper long enough to contain it. ”Curious” is fucking cool.

Curiosity is one of the hallmarks of actual interesting people, as opposed to “interesting” people, people who make for excellent fashion blogs and mediocre humans. The more I think about it, the more I feel like plain old genuine curiosity is the antidote to the creeping Internet-borne conviction that nothing that has not already been brought (strobe-lit and booming) to our attention is worth our attention.

David Mamet said interested people are interesting. I’d like to add that, in much that same way, curious people are the only people worth being curious about.