Curiosity is in great and generous minds

Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last.

Samuel Johnson

The meaning of the quote

In August 1751, a 41-year-old writer in a rented set of rooms off Fleet Street sat down to finish another essay in a series he wrote almost single-handedly, twice a week, under the name The Rambler.

That writer was Samuel Johnson. What came out of that sitting was Rambler No. 150, and buried inside it is this quote.

Johnson is describing an order of operations. Curiosity is the first appetite to show up in a mind built for thinking, arriving before ambition, before vanity, before the need to be right, and it is the last one still standing once everything else has burned off. Ambition fades once a goal is reached, and vanity fades once nobody is watching. Curiosity just keeps asking the next question.

That is what Rambler No. 150 argues start to finish. Johnson used the essay, titled “Adversity Useful to the Acquisition of Knowledge,” to argue that hardship teaches what comfort cannot. A mind that only ever gets good news runs out of fresh questions, but a mind that gets knocked around keeps finding new material. Curiosity, he writes, feeds off variety, and adversity supplies more of it than success ever will.

The test isn’t whether you’re curious when life is going well, since everyone is, but whether you’re still asking questions when a plan falls apart, a project runs years past its deadline or a friendship hits a rough patch. That’s the moment curiosity either keeps going or gives up its seat to frustration.

Try this

Next time a plan stalls, a scheme goes sideways or a book turns out harder than expected, swap the question you’re asking:

• Instead of: How do I get out of this?
• Try: What is this teaching me that I wouldn’t otherwise know?

This may not fix the problem, but it keeps the curiosity that got you into the mess from quitting before the mess does.

About the author

Samuel Johnson was born September 18, 1709, in Lichfield, England, the son of a struggling bookseller. As a baby he caught scrofula, a tubercular infection once known as the King’s Evil, and it left him half blind in one eye, partly deaf and scarred for life. His parents carried him to London to be touched by Queen Anne, who was still believed to cure the disease with a royal touch. It did not work.

He made it to Oxford but ran out of money after about 13 months and left without a degree. Back home, he tried opening a school with his wife’s savings. It attracted 3 students, one of them an 18-year-old named David Garrick, who would go on to become the most famous actor in England. In 1737, Johnson and Garrick walked from Lichfield to London together, barely enough money between them for the trip, one hoping to become a writer and the other an actor.

London did not make either of them rich right away. Johnson spent close to a decade grinding out essays and translations for pay, poor enough at one point that he and the poet Richard Savage reportedly walked the streets of London all night because neither could afford a room. Then, in 1746, a group of publishers hired him to write a dictionary of the English language. He told them it would take 3 years but It took 9.

Working mostly alone, aside from a handful of copying clerks, Johnson liked to point out that the French Academy had needed 40 scholars and 40 years to do the same job for French. His Dictionary of the English Language finally appeared in 1755, packed with 42,773 entries and more than 114,000 quotations pulled from English literature. It made him famous. In 1762, King George III granted him a pension of £300 a year, the first point in his life he did not have to write simply to eat.

He is remembered today for that dictionary, for the Rambler and Idler essays he wrote to fund it, for the short philosophical novel Rasselas and for his Lives of the Poets. Rasselas has its own hero story tucked inside it. Johnson reportedly wrote the whole novel in the evenings of a single week to cover his mother’s funeral costs and pay off her debts. But the version of Johnson most readers meet comes from someone else’s book. Nine years after he died, his friend James Boswell published The Life of Samuel Johnson, still ranked among the best biographies ever written in English.

Boswell is also the one who recorded that Johnson kept a cat named Hodge, and that he went out himself to buy oysters for Hodge rather than send a servant, worried the errand might make the staff resent the cat. A small bronze statue of Hodge, sitting beside an empty oyster shell, still stands outside Johnson’s old house on Gough Square in London.

Resources

• Adversity Useful to the Acquisition of Knowledge (Article)
• The Life of Samuel Johnson (Book)
• The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (Book)
• Hodge, Dr Johnson’s Cat (Article)
• Johnson’s Dictionary Online (Wiki)