Sincerity is the emotional component of honesty – the desire to be honest. Sincerity makes the very least person to be of more value than the most talented hypocrite. [attributed to Charles Spurgeon] . . . for a creative writer possession of the “truth” is less important than emotional sincerity. [George Orwell] I suppose my best attribute, if you want…
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Value for Tuesday of Week 12 in the season of Sowing
Being Inquisitive: Seeking Knowledge – Pursuing the Religious Quest
Our natural curiosity, underlain with humility, leads us to seek knowledge – not to claim to own it.
- When you are inquisitive, Jane, you always make me smile. You open your eyes like an eager bird, and make every now and then a restless movement, as if answers in speech did not flow fast enough for you, and you wanted to read the tablet of one’s heart. [Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre]
- Be inquisitive. Open your eyes, open your minds to things you don’t necessarily know even exist. I think that’s an important part of learning and growing. The more [you]’re willing to ask, the more {you}’re going to get out of it. [attributed to Jay Rinaldi]
- Blest are they who hunger and thirst for holiness; they shall have their fill. [The Bible, Matthew 5:6.]
Wondering is the first step toward inquisitiveness; it is the beginning of the religious quest before it springs into action. Curiosity is a middle stage, moving toward the pursuit of knowledge. Inquisitiveness, or the seeking of knowledge, is the third step, like launching the boat that represents the religious quest – the search for knowledge and meaning.
“. . . the word ‘inquisitive’ is closely associated with key terms such as ‘curiosity’, ‘exploration’, ‘learning’ and ‘desire’.” “Inquisitive” refers to being “very interested in learning about many different things”. It is closely related to curiosity, which refers to “having a strong desire to know about something”. Therefore, curiosity’s reference may be narrow or broad, while the reference for “inquisitive” is always broad.
Inquisitiveness could also be called intellectual curiosity, which yields many benefits. Here is a list of benefits and attributes of inquisitiveness.
Real
True Narratives
- Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World (Harper/HarperCollins Publishers, 2011): “Newton was a finicky, neurotic, off-scale brilliant character who seemed able to hold a problem in his mind, neither sleeping nor eating, ‘thinking on it continually,’ he said, until he’d solved it.”
- Daisy Dunn, The Shadow of Vesuvius: A Life of Pliny (Liveright, 2019): “It was his insatiable curiosity that got him killed. When Mount Vesuviuserupted in A.D. 79, he and his 17-year-old nephew were at Misenum, about 30 miles away, where the elder Pliny was in charge of the imperial fleet. Fascinated by a strange cloud that had suddenly appeared on the horizon, he decided to sail closer and investigate, but what began as a scientific expedition quickly turned into a rescue mission.”
From the dark side: seeking knowledge in ways that are not useful
- Graciela Mochkofsky, Prophet of the Andes: An Unlikely Journey to the Promised Land (Knopf, 2022): “The man at its center, Segundo Villanueva, spent a lifetime in study, reading and arguing about the Bible, forever hoping to discern the authentic voice of God. His desire to uncover the truth — a truth that he believed had been obscured by centuries of misinterpretation and guarded by worldly, corrupt men of the cloth — is in some ways reminiscent of the cultural conspiracies that roil our contemporary politics. Where knowledge seems to be hidden, men will drive themselves mad trying to find it.”
- Fergus Kerr, Thomas Aquinas: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2009): a biography of a leading intellectual who studied, justified and promoted fantasies, presuming that they were facts
Technical and Analytical Readings
- Irene Cogliati Dezza, Eric Schulz & Charley M. Wu, eds., The Drive for Knowledge: The Science of Human Information Seeking (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
- Andrew Briggs, Hans Halvorson & Andrew Steane, It Keeps Me Seeking: The Invitation from Science, Philosophy and Religion (Oxford University Press, 2018).
- Stuart Firestein, Ignorance: How It Drives Science (Oxford University Press, 2012): a new look at how ignorance drives scientific inquiry.
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
Neal Stephenson has written “funny and erudite novels, which are packed with so many different kinds of information, they sometimes scarcely feel like novels at all.”
- Readme: A Novel (HarperCollins Publishers, 2011), is “a book-shaped IV bag from which plot flows.”
- Anthem: A Novel (William Morrow, 2008)
- Interface: A Novel (Spectra, 2005) [co-authored with J. Frederick George]
- Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Volume I) (William Morrow, 2004)
- The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Volume II) (William Morrow, 2005)
- The System of the World (The Baroque Cycle, Volume III) (William Morrow, 2005)
- Cryptonomicon: A Novel (Avon, 2002)
- Snow Crash: A Novel (Turtleback, 2000)
- The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (Spectra, 1995)
Works by other authors:
- Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things: A Novel (Viking, 2013): a novel about a 19th-century botanist “whose hunger for explanations carries her through the better part of Darwin’s century. . . . a story of the Enlightenment, when people first thought to look to the natural world for life’s explanations, rather than to human-centric creation stories of an earth-anchored universe. . . .”
Poetry
'Is there anybody there? ' said the Traveller, / Knocking on the moonlit door; / And his horse in the silence champed the grass / Of the forest's ferny floor; / And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller's head: / And he smote upon the door again a second time; / 'Is there anybody there? ' he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller; / No head from the leaf-fringed sill / Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes, / Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners / That dwelt in the lone house then / Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight / To that voice from the world of men: / Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair, / That goes down to the empty hall, / Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken / By the lonely Traveller's call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness, / Their stillness answering his cry, / While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf, / 'Neath the starred and leafy sky; / For he suddenly smote on the door, even / Louder, and lifted his head:- / 'Tell them I came, and no one answered, / That I kept my word,' he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners, / Though every word he spake / Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house / From the one man left awake: / Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup, / And the sound of iron on stone, / And how the silence surged softly backward, / When the plunging hoofs were gone.
[Walter de la Mare, “The Listeners” (1912).]
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Ernest Krenek was a Modern-era composer who was always seeking musical answers. He said: “Looking back over the evolution of my musical style, I am not astonished that even benevolent observers became confused and vacillating in their faith. Whenever they thought I had comfortably settled down in some stylistic district, I was not at the expected place the next time, and the business of classifying had to start all over again. ...I have been striving for an ever-freer and more incisive articulation of musical thought.” “Krenek’s compositions are quite eclectic, a reflection of the diverse influences he was exposed to throughout his career. His music spans five distinct periods: atonal (1921-1923), Neo-classic (1924-1926), Romantic (1926-1931), twelve-tone (1931-1956), and serial (after 1957). Krenek completed over 200 works, including 20 operas, 7 string quartets, 5 symphonies, and a variety of instrumental, vocal, electronic, and film scores.” “In his early years Krenek was not a modernist, but later started using Schoenberg’s 12-tone system. His musical alliance with Schoenberg, his brief marriage to Mahler’s daughter, and above all his opera, convinced many Nazis that he must, somehow, be Jewish.” “His work, always avantgarde, had become increasingly political; Hitler banned it and labeled Krenek a cultural Bolshevist.” An Austrian native, he emigrated to the United States to escape the Nazis, and died at the age of 91. Here are links to his symphonies, three of his operas, his opera Jonny Spielt Auf, his opera Das geheime Königreich, and various of his works.
Peter Serkin was a classical pianist who was known to be constantly searching and questioning. “Like many who came of age in the 1960s, he questioned the establishment, both in society at large and within classical music.” Pianist Simone Dinnerstein said of him: “The most important lesson I took from my studies with Peter Serkin was that he didn't think there was one answer to the question of how to interpret a score. He was thoughtful and questioning and didn't rely on received wisdom. The lessons were investigations into the music that we made together, and by doing that he taught me how to be an independent thinker, and to be brave about following the path wherever the music led me.” Composer Ned Rorem wrote: “Serkin’s uniqueness lies, as I hear it, in a friendly rather than over-awed approach to the classics, which nonetheless plays with the care and brio that is in the family blood, and he’s not afraid to be ugly. He approaches contemporary music with the same depth as he does the classics, and he is unique among the superstars in that he approaches it at all.” Here is a link to Serkin’s playlists.
Intermittently meditative and active, intermittently serious and joyful, César Franck’s Symphony in D Minor, M 48 (1888) (approx. 36-44’) (list of recorded performances), expresses a core idea in Humanism. “. . . the listener who surrenders to the emotional elements in Franck’s music is drawn into a universe of yearning and questing, of searching and seeking.” Here is a list of recorded performances. Top audio recordings are conducted by Mengelberg in 1940, Furtwängler in 1945, Munch in 1956, Beecham in 1959, Paray in 1959, Monteux in 1961, Maazel in 1961, Ormandy in 1961, Stokowski in 1970, Bernstein in 1981, Dutoit in 1990.
Claude Debussy, Jeux (Poème Dansé), L. 126 (1912) (approx. 16-19’) (list of recorded performances), is an orchestral work and ballet, ostensibly about a simple subject matter but mysterious musically and obscure in meaning. Debussy described it as follows: “There is a park, a tennis court; there is a chance meeting of two girls and a young man seeking a lost ball; a nocturnal landscape, and a suggestion of something sinister in the darkening shadows.” The scenario for the ballet specifies: “The artificial light of the large electric lamps suggests the idea of childish play: they play hide and seek, they quarrel. The night is warm, the sky bathed in a pale light; they embrace. This spell is broken when another tennis ball mysteriously appears. Surprised and alarmed, the young man and the girls disappear into the nocturnal depths of the garden.” Watching the ballet, we see the young man being intrigued by the two young women. Top recorded performances are conducted by Haitink in 1979, Boulez in 1994, Nott in 2018, and de Sabata in 1947.
Other works:
- Franz Schubert, String Quartet No. 9 in G minor, D 173 (1815) (approx. 24-25’) (list of recorded performances): “. . . notice the adventurous and freewheeling modulation between keys. Listen to the way the first movement’s brief development section pulls us, suddenly, into a terrifying new world of haunting mystery.”
- György Kurtág, Kafka Fragments (Kafka-Fragmente), Op. 24 (1986) (approx. 52-61’) (list of recorded performances), “centers on the archetypal theme of wandering, the seeking of a path that remains profoundly elusive. Certain of the trenchant texts extracted by Kurtág from Kafka’s diaries and letters call into question or even deny the very existence of such a path, or Weg. Yet for Kurtág as for Schubert, the need to keep searching for the elusive goal is inescapable, an existential necessity.” Excellent performances are by Csengery & Keller in 1987, Komsi & Oramo in 1995, Banse & Keller in 2006, Melzer & Stark in 2015, Prohaska & Faust in 2022, and Narucki & Macomber in 2025.
- James Willey, String Quartet No. 7 (2000) (approx. 20’): In the opening movement, the cello explores variations on a theme as the higher voices hover over him. The remainder of the work consists of a “Slow” second movement and a “Fast” third movement. The entire work can be seen as an extended intellectual and spiritual journey.
- Alfred Schnittke, Concerto for Choir (1985) (approx. 40-44’’) (list of recorded performances): “The concerto’s four movements each find a different balance between the contemplative and the dramatic.”
- Hans Abrahamsen, Schnee (Snow): Canons for nine instruments (2008) (approx. 54’). Abrahamsen explains: “The guideline or rule for the canons is very simple: We start out with an answering Vorsatz, followed by a questioning Nachsatz. Throughout the time of the piece, these two are intertwined more and more, as more and more dicht geführt [tightly composed] canons, until, at the end, they are interchanged. Now the question and then the answer. The two canons are identical like a painting in two versions, but with different colors. And where the first one does not include the space, the second one does, as well as containing more canonical traces.”
- Ondřej Adámek, “Where Are You?” (2020) (approx. 35’): “In the eleven-part, approximately 35-minute-long kaleidoscope of sound, dominated by constant motoric movement – ranging from everyday sounds such as the monotonous ticking of a clock to the sweeping, electrifyingly rhythmic pounding of the orchestra tutti – the composer embarks on a search for the human ('Where do we come from and where are we going?') and the divine.”
- Malcolm Dedman, Piano Sonata No. 2, “In Search” (1984) (approx. 16’)
- Symon Clarke, Concerto for Violincello & Orchestra, “Tupaia’s Map” (2016) (approx. 32’): “The map in question refers to the name of a resident of Tahiti who is tied into the story of Cook’s voyages in the Pacific: Tupaia acted as a guide and interpreter (until he died of fever in Java). While in Tahiti, Cook attempted to map the area, including surrounding islands, and asked Tupaia also to draw a map. Tupaia’s was hardly to scale: islands more important to the cartographer were made larger than those he found less significant; also, size was determined by ease of approach, not physical size.”
- Outi Tarkiainen, Saxophone Concerto, “Saivo” (2016) (approx. 22’): “The word ‘saivo’ originates from the ancient Sami beliefs meaning a two-bottomed lake, where under a lake dwells another lake and another world which is inhabited by otherworldly creatures – a world that is the exact mirror image of our world. The saxophone concerto builds sonorous timbral bridges between the effected soprano saxophone and the orchestra, and grows eventually into an illusion of another reality which is similar, yet in a peculiar way different than the world we know.”
Albums:
- Barre Phillips, “Quest” (13’), from the album “End to End” (2018)
- Peter Knight & Australian Art Orchestra, “Crossed and Recrossed” (2021) (38’): “. . . Peter Knight and the Australian Art Orchestra challenge the nature of music making and seek to explore and extend compositional boundaries in unexpected and surprisingly beautiful ways.” “Were we ever really here?”
- Adam Bałdych & Leszek Możdżer, “Passacaglia” (2024) (61’): “Two of Poland’s most accomplished musicians at one with the art of spontaneous improvisation here create their own musical genre to create their own space. Rather than being limited by the terms jazz and classical music, they dip into both with a spirit of enquiry and no little adventure to see where they end up.”
Music: songs and other short pieces
Visual Arts
- Gustave Courbet, The White Sail (1877)
