AFTERWORD

Bjarni

The first European to land in North America was not Christopher Columbus, but a Norse explorer named Leif Eriksson. According to Nordic saga — recently supported by archaeological evidence — Eriksson established a settlement at a place he called Vinland, on what is now the northern tip of Newfoundland, in modern-day Canada.

In the sagas, there are two conflicting accounts of how he got there. One is that, early in the second millennium, Eriksson was blown off course during a voyage from Norway to Greenland, where he aimed to convert the locals to Christianity. Another gives him more credit, suggesting that he set out from Norway fully intending to visit the New World, after hearing about it from another sailor. If the latter version is true, Eriksson was the first European to land in the New World, but he wasn’t the first to see it. That honour goes to the guy who tipped him off: Bjarni Herjolfsson.

Born and raised in Iceland, Bjarni was a merchant captain based in Norway. In about ad 986, he made his annual summer voyage home to see his parents. He arrived at the end of his journey only to find that his father wasn’t home, having gone on a journey to Greenland with Eric the Red47 (the sagas do not record how Bjarni felt about this).

A dutiful son, Bjarni and his crew set sail for Greenland. On the way, they encountered a great storm that lasted for several days, and their small ship was blown many miles off course. When the storm cleared, Bjarni and the crew could see land. It looked nothing like the glacial and inhospitable Greenland, however. This land was covered in dense forests and rolling green hills. Bjarni’s crew, intrigued by the prospect of an earthly paradise, begged their captain to allow them to go ashore. But Bjarni refused. He had a mission — to find his father — and he wasn’t about to be diverted from it. He ordered the crew to head north. America remained undiscovered.

Even in his own day Bjarni was criticised for not seizing the opportunity with which fate had presented him. But let’s try, for a moment, to see things from his point of view. Bjarni was a merchant, and a son, and he wanted to get to Greenland before the onset of winter so that he could settle there with his family, and trade his cargo. A trip to see an unknown land must have seemed like an unnecessary and dangerous distraction.

Curiosity is all very well in hindsight. But when it’s happening, it drags us away from our tasks and our goals, bending our days out of shape. Like the narrator of Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, when we are in the grip of curiosity we easily forget about what we’re supposed to be doing and become absorbed by the mystery of falling snow. These days we correctly regard the premodern prohibition of curiosity as repressive and archaic. But Augustine and others were right, in a sense — curiosity is a kind of perversion, a swerving away or deviation from the task at hand. Fabyan’s project at Riverbank was at once admirable and slightly mad, a rich man’s indulgence. Bjarni’s men wanted to explore the verdant land they saw, no doubt dreaming of untold riches and willing virgins. But Bjarni had promises to keep.

Curiosity’s difficulties are worthwhile, however. In a speech to Kenyon College’s graduating class of 2005 the novelist David Foster Wallace made the case that the practice of curiosity is vital to a happy and well-lived life. His premise was that we are all, inevitably, helplessly self-centred:

Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

It’s only through the exercise of our curiosity about others, suggested Wallace, that we can free ourselves from our hard-wired self-obsession. We should do this, not just because it is the virtuous thing to do, but because it’s the best way to cope with the ‘boredom, routine and petty frustration’ of everyday life. He gives the examples of standing in a long line at the supermarket checkout or getting caught in an end-of-day traffic jam. Tired and hungry, you can become furious at everyone around you and bemoan your own singular agony, or, ‘if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice,’ you can choose to look differently at the scene in which you find yourself. Imagine that the woman screaming at her kid in the checkout line has been up for three nights in a row nursing her sick husband, or that the driver who just cut you off is trying to get his child to hospital.

This, submits Wallace, is the purpose of education — ‘the job of a lifetime’. Being educated involves understanding how to think, and thus escape our default setting. I think this is wise and true. Where I think Wallace goes wrong is when he says that this ability has ‘almost nothing to do with knowledge’. It has everything to do with knowledge. Firstly, even empathic curiosity depends on epistemic curiosity; putting yourself in the shoes of the woman in the supermarket line requires a little knowledge of what it’s like to live a life far removed from one’s own. Secondly, as we’ve seen, thinking skills don’t exist separately from knowledge, but grow out of it. Thirdly, worldly knowledge offers you another escape route from self-obsession; in the traffic jam, you could think about the book you read recently on the history of Roman Britain, as Laura McInerney considered the chemistry of eggs.

The writer Geoff Dyer describes depression, from which he has suffered, as ‘the complete absence of any interest in anything.’ In his book Out of Sheer Rage, Dyer describes how, when he was depressed, he went from being someone who was voraciously interested in the world — who read and travelled incessantly and widely — to someone who couldn’t think of a single thing that he wanted to do, see or read. ‘I had no interest in anything, no curiosity.’ He spent his days in his apartment, watching a TV that wasn’t turned on.

Eventually, a switch inside him flipped: Dyer became interested in his own mental condition. He read William Styron’s memoir of depression, Darkness Visible, and Julia Kristeva’s discussion of melancholia, Black Sun. In the latter, he came across a passage from Dostoevsky on Holbein’s Dead Christ, which reactivated a long-dormant interest Dyer had had in the ways writers write about paintings. He started to think about the museums and exhibitions he would like to visit. Before he knew it, ‘I was interested in the world again.’ The psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips has said that he sees his purpose as a therapist being, somewhat paradoxically, ‘to free people not to have to bother to be interested in themselves.’ Happiness, he believes, is associated with the realisation that ‘the only interesting things are outside oneself.’

The popular American comic book writer Matt Fraction received a harrowingly honest note on his website from a fan who revealed that he or she was contemplating suicide, saying, ‘I know there is beauty and wonderful things in this world . . . But what if I’m not interested?’ In Fraction’s reply, worth reading in full (I provide a link in the endnotes), he recalled a time when he himself had felt very close to suicide, and what it was that got him through:

I wondered, then — well, is there anything you’re curious about. Anything you want to see play out. And i thought of a comic i was reading and i’d not figured out the end of the current storyline. And i realized I had curiosity. And that was the hook i’d hang my hat on. that by wanting to see how something played out I wasn’t really ready. That little sprout of a thing poking up through all that black earth kept me around a little longer.

Curiosity is a life force. If depression involves a turning inwards, a feeling that there’s nothing in the world that is worthy of our attention (or that nothing we pay attention to is worthy) then it is curiosity which takes us the other way, that reminds us that the world is an inexhaustibly diverting, inspiring, fascinating place. It’s a sentiment beautifully expressed in this passage from The Once and Future King, by T.H. White:

The best thing for being sad,’ replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, ‘is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.

Today, our capacity to absorb information is hopelessly overmatched by the amount of information worth learning. I can sympathise with the fear David Foster Wallace expressed as one of drowning in ‘Total Noise’, ‘the Tsunami of available fact, context and perspective’. But any reservations I have about our contemporary cognitive environment pale in comparison to my overwhelming feelings of gratitude. I feel lucky to be living in an age when our collective memory wells are so deep. We have never known more than we do today about why the world wags and what wags it.

Isaac Newton, writing in 1676, felt he was standing on the shoulders of giants. From our own heady vantage point, early in the second millennium, we can take in a view of breathtaking majesty; a better one than was available to Newton, or to Thomas Jefferson or Albert Einstein, not to mention the billions of ordinary men and women who preceded us, most of whom, no matter how naturally curious, were confined to intellectual universes tiny compared to our own. Not only is there more knowledge, there’s more access to it; unlike nearly everyone who have ever lived, if you want to learn about Montaigne, or genetic science, or black holes, or modernist architecture or the theories of Friedrich Hayek, you can. The same is true of cultural knowledge; it’s an obvious but easily forgotten truth that it is better to have lived after Beethoven, and after The Beatles, than before them.

So will you take advantage of this sublimely lucky break or not?

Epistemic curiosity can be tough to justify in the moment. It is hard work, it diverts us from our tasks and goals, and we never quite know where it will take us. But we have a choice. We can decide to explore the worlds of knowledge that present themselves to us. Or, like Bjarni, we can turn our face from the beauty and the mystery and make for the next appointment.

47 Leif Eriksson’s father, and the founder of Greenland.