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Overview
Manguel chooses as his guides a selection of writers who sparked his imagination. He dedicates each chapter to a single thinker, scientist, artist, or other figure who demonstrated in a fresh way how to ask “Why?” Leading us through a full gallery of inquisitives, among them Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, Lewis Carroll, Rachel Carson, Socrates, and, most importantly, Dante, Manguel affirms how deeply connected our curiosity is to the readings that most astonish us, and how essential to the soaring of our own imaginations.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300189414 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 392 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Curiosity
By Alberto Manguel
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Alberto ManguelAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-18941-4
CHAPTER 1
What Is Curiosity?
Everything begins with a voyage. One day, when I was eight or nine, in Buenos Aires, I lost my way coming back from class. The school was one of many that I attended in my childhood, and stood a short distance from our house, in the tree-lined neighborhood of Belgrano. Then as now, I was easily distracted, and all sorts of things caught my attention as I walked back home in the starched white pinafore all schoolchildren were obliged to wear: the corner grocery store that before the age of supermarkets held large barrels of briny olives, cones of sugar wrapped in light-blue paper, blue tins of Canale biscuits; the stationer's with its patriotic notebooks displaying the faces of our national heroes and shelves lined with the yellow covers of the Robin Hood children's series; a tall, narrow door with harlequin stained glass which was sometimes left open, revealing a grim courtyard where a tailor's mannequin mysteriously languished; the sweet seller, a fat man sitting at a street corner on a tiny stool, who held, like a lance, his kaleidoscopic wares. I usually took the same way back, counting off the landmarks as I passed them, but that day I decided to change course. After a few blocks, I realized I didn't know the way. I was too ashamed to ask for directions, so I wandered, more astonished than frightened, for what seemed to me a very long time.
I don't know why I did what I did, except that I wanted to experience something new, to follow whatever clues I might find to mysteries not yet apparent, as in the Sherlock Holmes stories, which I had just discovered. I wanted to deduce the secret story of the doctor with a battered walking stick, to reveal that the tiptoeing footmarks in the mud were those of a man running for his life, to ask myself why someone would be wearing a groomed black beard that was no doubt false. "The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes," said the Master.
I remember becoming aware, with a feeling of pleasurable anxiety, that I was engaging in an adventure different from the ones on my shelves and yet I experienced something of the same suspense, the same intense desire to find out what lay ahead, without being able (without wanting) to foretell what might take place. I felt as if I'd entered a book and was on the way to its undisclosed final pages. What exactly was I looking for? Perhaps this was when for the first time I conceived of the future as a place that held together the tail-ends of all the possible stories.
But nothing happened. At long last, I turned a corner and found myself on familiar ground. When I finally saw my house, it felt like a disappointment.
* * *
But we hold several threads in our hands, and the odds are that one or other of them guides us to the truth. We may waste time following the wrong one, but sooner or later, we must come upon the right.
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Hound of the Baskervilles"
* * *
Curiosity is a word with a double meaning. The etymological Spanish dictionary of Covarrubias of 1611 defines curioso (it is the same in Italian) as a person who treats something with particular care and diligence, and the great Spanish lexicographer explains its derivation curiosidad (in Italian, curiosità) as resulting because "the curious person is always asking: 'Why this and why that?'" Roger Chartier has noted that these first definitions did not satisfy Covarrubias, and in a supplement written in 1611 and 1612 (and left unpublished) Covarrubias added that curioso has "both a positive and a negative sense. Positive, because the curious person treats things diligently; and negative, because the person labors to scrutinize things that are most hidden and reserved, and do not matter." There follows a quotation in Latin from one of the apocryphal books of the Bible, Ecclesiasticus: "Do not try to understand things that are too difficult for you, or try to discover what is beyond your powers" (3:21&ndsah;22). With this, according to Chartier, Covarrubias opens his definition to the biblical and patristic condemnation of curiosity as the illicit yearning to know what is forbidden. Of this ambiguous nature of curiosity, Dante was certainly aware.
Dante composed almost all, if not all, of the Commedia while in exile, and the account of his poetic pilgrimage can be read as a hopeful mirror of his forced pilgrimage on earth. Curiosity drives him, in Covarrubias's sense of treating things "diligently," but also in the sense of seeking to know what is "most hidden and reserved" and lies beyond words. In a dialogue with his otherworldly guides (Beatrice, Virgil, Saint Bernard) and with the damned and blessed souls he encounters, Dante allows his curiosity to lead him on towards the ineffable goal. Language is the instrument of his curiosity—even as he tells us that the answer to his most burning questions cannot be uttered by a human tongue—and his language can be also the instrument of ours. Dante can act, in our reading of the Commedia, as a "midwife" of our thoughts, as Socrates once defined the role of the seeker of knowledge. The Commedia allows us to bring our questions into being.
Dante died in exile in Ravenna on 13 or 14 September 1321, after having recorded in the last verses of his Commedia his vision of the everlasting light of God. He was fifty-six years old. According to Giovanni Boccaccio, Dante had begun writing the Commedia sometime before his banishment from Florence, and had been forced to abandon in the city the first seven cantos of the Inferno. Someone, Boccaccio says, searching for a document among the papers in Dante's house, found the cantos without knowing they were by Dante, read them with admiration, and took them for inspection to a Florentine poet "of some renown," who guessed that they were Dante's work and contrived to send them on to him. Always according to Boccaccio, Dante was at the time at the estate of Moroello Malaspina in Lunigiana; Malaspina received the cantos, read them, and begged Dante not to abandon a work so magnificently begun. Dante consented and began the eighth canto of the Inferno with the words: "I say, carrying on, that long before ..." So goes the story.
Extraordinary literary works seem to demand extraordinary tales of their conception. Magical biographies of a phantom Homer were invented to account for the power of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Virgil was lent the gifts of a necromancer and herald of Christianity because, his readers thought, the Aeneid could not have been composed by an ordinary man. Consequently, the conclusion of a masterpiece must be even more extraordinary than its inception. As the writing of the Commedia advanced, Boccaccio tells us, Dante began to send the completed cantos to one of his patrons, Cangrande della Scala, in lots of six or eight. In the end, Cangrande would have received the entire work with the exception of the last thirteen cantos of Paradiso. For the months following Dante's death, his sons and disciples searched among his papers to see if he had not perhaps finished the missing cantos. Finding nothing, says Boccaccio, "they were enraged that God had not allowed him to live in the world long enough to have the chance of concluding what little remained of his work." One night, Jacopo, Dante's third son, had a dream. He saw his father approach, dressed in a white gown, his face shining with a strange light. Jacopo asked him if he was still alive, and Dante said that he was, but in the true life, not in ours. Jacopo then asked whether he had finished his Commedia. "Yes," was the answer, "I finished it," and he led Jacopo to his old bedroom, where, putting his hand on a certain place on the wall, he announced, "Here is what you were searching for for so long." Jacopo woke, fetched an old disciple of Dante's, and together they discovered, behind a hanging cloth, a recess containing moldy writings which proved to be the missing cantos. They copied them out and sent them, according to Dante's habit, to Cangrande. "Thus," Boccaccio tells us, "was the task of so many years brought to its conclusion."
Boccaccio's story, which today is regarded less as factual history than as an admiring legend, lends the creation of what is perhaps the greatest poem ever penned an appropriately magical frame. And yet neither the initial suspenseful interruption nor the final happy revelation suffice, in the reader's mind, to account for the invention of such a work. The history of literature is rich in stories about desperate situations in which writers have managed to create masterpieces. Ovid dreaming his Tristia in the hellhole of Toomis, Boethius writing his Consolation of Philosophy in prison, Keats composing his great odes while dying of tubercular fever, Kafka scribbling his Metamorphosis in the public corridor of his parents' house contradict the assumption that a writer can write only under auspicious circumstances. Dante's case is, however, particular.
In the late thirteenth century, Tuscany was split into two political factions: the Guelphs, loyal to the pope, and the Ghibellines, loyal to the imperial cause. In 1260, the Ghibellines defeated the Guelphs at the Battle of Montaperti; a few years later, the Guelphs began to regain their lost power, eventually expelling the Ghibellines from Florence. By 1270 the city was entirely Guelph and would remain so throughout Dante's lifetime. Shortly after Dante's birth in 1265, the Guelphs of Florence divided into the Blacks and the Whites, this time along family rather than political lines. On 7 May 1300, Dante took part in an embassy to San Gimigniano on behalf of the ruling White faction; a month later he was elected one of the six priors of Florence. Dante, who believed that church and state should not interfere in one another's spheres of action, opposed the political ambitions of Pope Boniface VIII; consequently, when he was sent to Rome in the autumn of 1301 as part of the Florentine embassy, Dante was ordered to stay at the papal court while the other ambassadors returned to Florence. On 1 November, in Dante's absence, the landless French prince Charles de Valois (whom Dante despised as an agent of Boniface) entered Florence, supposedly to restore peace but in fact to allow a group of exiled Blacks to enter the city. Led by their chief, Corso Donati, for five days the Blacks pillaged Florence and murdered many of its citizens, driving the surviving Whites into exile. In time, the exiled Whites became identified with the Ghibelline faction, and a Black priorate was installed to rule Florence. In January 1302, Dante, who was probably still in Rome, was condemned to exile by the priorate. Later, when he refused to pay the fine imposed as penalty, his sentence of two years' exile was changed to that of being burned at the stake if he ever returned to Florence. All his goods were confiscated.
Dante's exile took him first to Forlì, then, in 1303, to Verona, where he stayed until the death of the city's lord, Bartolomeo della Scala, on 7 March 1304. Because the new ruler of Verona, Alboino della Scala, was unfriendly, or because Dante thought he could enlist the sympathies of the new pope, Benedict XI, the exile returned to Tuscany, probably to Arezzo. For the next few years his itinerary is uncertain—perhaps he moved to Treviso, but Lunigiana, Lucca, Padua, and Venice are also possible halting places; in 1309 or 1310 he may have visited Paris. In 1312, Dante returned to Verona. Cangrande della Scala had become, a year earlier, the city's sole ruler, and thereafter Dante lived in Verona under his protection, until at least 1317. Dante's final years were spent in Ravenna, at the court of Guido Novelo da Polenta.
In the absence of irrefutable documentary evidence, scholars suggest that Dante began the Inferno either in 1304 or 1306, the Purgatorio in 1313, and the Paradiso in 1316. The exact dating matters less than the astonishing fact that Dante wrote the Commedia during almost twenty years of wandering in more than ten alien cities, away from his library, his desk, his papers, his talismans—the superstitious bric-à-brac with which every writer constructs a working theater. In unfamiliar rooms, amidst people to whom he owed polite gratitude, in spaces that, because they were not his intimate own, must have seemed relentlessly public, always subject to social niceties and the conventions of others, it must have been a daily struggle to find small moments of privacy and silence in which to work. Since his own books were not available, with his annotations and remarks scribbled on the margins, his main recourse was the library of his mind, marvelously furnished (as the countless literary, scientific, theological, and philosophical references in the Commedia show) but subject, like all such libraries, to the depletions and blurrings that come with age.
What were his first attempts like? In a document preserved by Boccaccio, a certain Brother Ilario, "a humble monk of Corvo," says that one day a traveler came to his monastery. Brother Ilario recognized him, "for though I had never once seen him before that day, his fame had long before reached me." Perceiving the monk's interest, the traveler "drew a little book from his bosom in a friendly enough way" and showed him some verses. The traveler, of course, was Dante; the verses, the initial cantos of the Inferno, which, though written in the vernacular of Florence, Dante tells the monk he had at first intended to write in Latin. If Boccaccio's document is authentic, then Dante had managed to take with him into exile the first few pages of his poem. It would have been enough.
We know that early on in his travels, Dante had begun to send friends and patrons copies of a few of the cantos, which were then often copied and passed along to other readers. In August 1313, the poet Cino da Pistoia, one of Dante's friends in the early years, included glosses of a few verses from two cantos of the Inferno in a song he wrote on the death of the emperor Henry VII; in 1314 or perhaps somewhat earlier, a Tuscan notary, Francesco da Barberino, mentions the Commedia in his Documenti d'amore. There are several other proofs that Dante's work was known and admired (and envied and scorned) long before the Commedia's completion. Barely twenty years after Dante's death, Petrarch mentions how illiterate artists recited parts of the poem at crossroads and theaters to applauding drapers, innkeepers, and customers in shops and markets.6 Cino, and later Cangrande, must have had an almost complete manuscript of the poem, and we know that Dante's son Jacopo worked from a holograph copy to produce a one-volume Commedia for Guido da Polenta. Today not a single line in Dante's hand has come down to us. Coluccio Salutati, an erudite Florentine humanist who translated parts of the Commedia into Latin, recalled seeing Dante's "lean script" in some of his now lost epistles in the Chancery of Florence, but we can only imagine what his handwriting looked like.
How the notion of writing the chronicle of a journey to the Otherworld came to Dante is, of course, an unanswerable question. A clue may lie at the end of his Vita nova, an autobiographical essay structured around thirty-one lyric poems whose meaning, purpose, and origin Dante attributes to his love for Beatrice: in the last chapter, Dante speaks of an "admirable vision" which makes him resolve to write "what has never been written of any other woman." A second explanation may be the fascination felt for popular tales of otherworldly journeys among Dante's contemporaries. In the thirteenth century these imaginary voyages had become a thriving literary genre, born perhaps from anxieties to know what lies beyond the last breath: to revisit the departed and learn whether they require the weak hold of our memory for their continued existence, to find out whether our actions on this side of the grave have consequences on the other. Such questions, of course, were not new even then: ever since we started telling stories, in the days before history, we began to draw up a detailed geography for the regions of the Otherworld. Dante would have been familiar with a number of these travelogues. Homer, for instance, allowed Odysseus to visit the Land of the Dead on his delayed return to Ithaca; Dante, who had no Greek, knew the version of that descent given by Virgil in his Aeneid. Saint Paul, in his Second Epistle to the Corinthians, wrote of a man who had been to Paradise and "heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter" (12:4). When Virgil appears to Dante and tells him that he will lead him "through an eternal place," Dante acquiesces, but then hesitates.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Curiosity by Alberto Manguel. Copyright © 2015 Alberto Manguel. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction, 1,1. What Is Curiosity?, 11,
2. What Do We Want to Know?, 31,
3. How Do We Reason?, 49,
4. How Can We See What We Think?, 65,
5. How Do We Question?, 83,
6. What Is Language?, 107,
7. Who Am I?, 127,
8. What Are We Doing Here?, 147,
9. Where Is Our Place?, 165,
10. How Are We Different?, 183,
11. What Is an Animal?, 201,
12. What Are the Consequences of Our Actions?, 219,
13. What Can We Possess?, 235,
14. How Can We Put Things in Order?, 255,
15. What Comes Next?, 273,
16. Why Do Things Happen?, 295,
17. What Is True?, 311,
Notes, 329,
Acknowledgments, 363,
Index, 365,
Interviews
"For Alberto Manguel reading is a pilgrimage, a secular-sacred encounter with mystery, and a way of reinvigorating the dead. Dante and Montaigne and Pinocchio’s Collodi are his guides and his intimates in this passionate quest for knowledge, but it is the state of inquiry itself and even doubt that define for him the pleasures of curiosity. With his loving, keenly felt, highly enjoyable delving into writers and their writings, Manguel argues for literature’s revelatory illusions, its epiphanies and its testimony."—Marina Warner, author of Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights
"This is a dynamic, lively book that leads the reader to appreciate the pleasures and the power of curiosity. In writing its remarkable history Alberto Manguel sees it both as a primary passion and as a force behind all intellectual experiences. In a sort of encyclopedic narrative Manguel journeys over the most distant places—from Dante’s Florence to Rome, Jerusalem, Athens, and Latin America, etc.—and he invites us to a grand tour of wonders and surprises."—Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University
"Alberto Manguel is a wanderer among books, immensely curious in such an intriguing way that he lets his readers easily discover the fruits of his curiosity."—Roberto Calasso
"Manguel vaults over the traditional fences of genre, literary history, and discipline with breathtaking virtuosity. He is the Montaigne de nos jours and, as regards this latest effort, if they put another rover on Mars they should call it 'Manguel.'"—John Sutherland, University College London, author of A Little History of Literature
"Books jump out of their jackets when Manguel opens them and dance in delight as they make contact with his ingenious, voluminous brain."—Peter Conrad, The Observer, on A Reader on Reading