Curiosity Is My Most Enduring Obsession
Ontology as anti-depressant, Zoloft without the grogginess
Did my age make me or I my age? How much of me would be the same in any other time or place? Was God, when He visited, fact or phantom?
I dive into such questions as into a cool pool on a hot day, twisting and floating in their complications. This is not my will but my way, no achievement but an attribute. I do not believe my explorations have value. I’ve sometimes rued how my wondering removed my eyes from a prize.
Do you find my curiosity odd? I find its absence in others odd. How can anyone not want to know how they got here! I’m far more interested in my origins than my destination. The afterlife has never convinced me, but for sure some great gust wafted me here.
Plus or minus, what made me made us all.
My questions, I’m pretty sure, are unanswerable. I hope so. Whoever knows for sure has stopped asking. How do they spend their time? How maintain their humility? Who could abide the company of such know-it-alls! Tackling imponderables is my brain’s recreation, how it works up a sweat. I’d be a smug blob if I knew.
I blush to confess my avidity. I know few living who do this. If we met, I doubt I’d want to converse about our shared concerns, we’d get bogged down in definitions. I resist having my God diagnosed as a delusion. His absence would impoverish my world. Ontology for me is a game of solitaire.
My curiosity is not philosophical, theological, professional, but existential: something like pure, as opposed to applied, mathematics. I see no benefit from my ruminations, other than the comforting company of readers and predecessors comparably perplexed. I am drawn to makers who wrestled being, but only if graceful writers. (Most so-called philosophy I recoil from it’s so vilely said.) Thoreau was the first I encountered trying to dope out life on his own. Montaigne, Shakespeare, Spinoza, George Herbert, Dr. Johnson, Emily Dickinson, Santayana, T.S. Eliot I deem fellow passengers in our leaky boat. (My list is always in formation.) None have answers: questioning was their quest.
What’s the aim of my maundering? None that I can make out. What’s the aim of any appetite? We enjoy what we enjoy, who knows why. I’m convinced, as habits go, this one’s pretty harmless, maybe even healthful. Thinking makes me better at thinking. It also quiets my mind, which is subject to mood swings. Ontology as anti-depressant, Zoloft without the grogginess, you might say.
My curiosity is no more laudable than any other pastime. I find it more interesting than golf, fishing, shopping, televised sports, but that’s just me. De gustibus non disputandum est, Horace is supposed to have said. Some people enjoy Wordle even – go figure.
The most delectable luxury of retirement is time for pondering. Career was always yanking me from my dream. Now, with no one expecting me, I can loll for hours in the hush. Well-wishers commend me for producing daily missives for a decade. They might as well congratulate me for breathing. I can’t help myself. If my musings amuse others, that is icing on the cake.
The oddity of my absorption makes me more tolerant of others. The more ourselves we are, the more peculiar. Communities conspire to make us alike: imitation flatters, while nonconformity implicitly critiques. My affect is conventional, I trust, but my mind feels exiled from its instant. Jane, who’s as smart as anybody I know, isn’t interested in self-spelunking. Happily, she puts up with me. It takes all sorts, she figures.
Your musings amuse me.