Curiosity will get you through

Curiosity will get you through hard times when nothing else will.

Jim Harrison

The meaning of the quote

In 1944, a neighbor girl in Grayling, Michigan, struck 7-year-old Jim Harrison in the face with a broken bottle and took the sight in his left eye.

Instead of sitting with it, he wandered the fields, creeks and swamp behind his family’s farm for hours at a stretch, watching snakes, birds and whatever insect happened to cross his path. Decades later, in his memoir Off to the Side, he traced his recovery straight back to that habit.

“Wandering in this grand emptiness allowed me to survive my blinding in reasonably good mental shape.”

Optimism needs a reason to believe things will get better, but curiosity doesn’t. It only needs one small, odd thing worth a second look, a bird doing something strange, a bug flipped on its back, a crack in the mud shaped like a river. A boy who’d just lost sight in one eye still had a whole swamp of things he’d never bothered to look at closely, and that was enough to carry him through days optimism alone couldn’t have talked him into.

Psychologists who study how people get through hard stretches have found something similar. Curiosity behaviors can act as a buffer against hardship, even when a person has no clear answers in front of them. You don’t need to solve the problem. You just need something to look at next.

Harrison kept the habit for the rest of his life. In his 70s, he mentioned knowing a group of Chihuahuan ravens for 19 years, close enough that a few of them took walks with him, and he wrote poems out of what he noticed on those walks. The blind eye never grew back. The looking never stopped.

When something knocks you flat and you can’t see a way through it yet, don’t wait until you feel hopeful again before you move. Go find one small, specific thing worth noticing today, and let the noticing pull you forward while the rest catches up.

About the author

By his mid-30s, Harrison was broke and stuck. He had novellas nobody wanted to publish and no way to buy the time he needed to finish his next book. His friend, the novelist Thomas McGuane, had introduced him to the actor Jack Nicholson, and when Nicholson heard how tight things had gotten, he sent Harrison $30,000 without asking for anything back. That money bought him the room to sit down and finish the work.

“I wrote Legends of the Fall in nine days and when I re-read it, I only had to change one word.”

That novella became the 1994 film Legends of the Fall, starring Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins, and it won the Academy Award for cinematography.

Harrison was born in 1937 in Grayling, Michigan, and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in comparative literature from Michigan State University. He went on to publish 24 novellas over his career, along with novels, essay collections and more than a dozen books of poetry, the form he said mattered to him most even though it never sold like his fiction did.

Harrison ate as seriously as he wrote.

In 2003, at a three-star restaurant in Burgundy, France, he sat down to a 37-course lunch that ran 24 hours and went through 14 bottles of wine. In a 2004 essay for The New Yorker, he wrote up the meal as an experiment in whether overeating has a logic of its own, and noted that the wine alone probably cost as much as a new Volvo station wagon.

The quote comes from that same 2002 memoir, written when Harrison was in his 60s and looking back across a life built on hunting, fishing, food, France and paying close attention to the natural world, the same instincts that got him through being 7 years old and half-blind in a Michigan swamp.

Harrison died of heart failure on March 26, 2016, at his writing desk in Patagonia, Arizona. He was working on a poem.

Resources

• Off to the Side: A Memoir (Book)
• A Really Big Lunch: The Roving Gourmand on Food and Life (Book)
• Remembering author Jim Harrison in his own words (Video)
• The protective role of curiosity in coping with hard times (Article)
• Jim Harrison (Wikipedia)