curiosity

No one talks about the way in which the world, in all of its bewildering capability, is, at every second, offering some detail that might lead to a new way of framing, of thinking, of imagining. The delight of reading involves developing an awareness of the way so many people pay attention to this world, and to themselves.

Curiosity cannot be cultivated inside cultures that treat knowledge exclusively as a static object in which engagement with thinking is positioned as the banking of information. Human beings are not savings accounts, they are originators of value creation—one of the key attributes of curiosity.

In John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Berger describes the relation between what we see and what we know, more precisely arguing that what we know impacts what we see (and vice versa). Talking about the ubiquitous abundance of images and their increasingly ephemeral, insubstantial, and available meaning, he says, “If the new language of images were used