About hundred and fifty years ago it was raining in Scotland and a man who had published virtually nothing began to draw a map to entertain his bored nephew. As he helped his nephew to draw the map, his curiosity was ignited!
The map grew, places were named including the evocative ‘Skeleton Island’ .
Unsurprisingly with names like that, the act of creating the map made things start to come alive!
Thus, the writer’s curiosity was activated by a combination of his practical kinaesthetic actions involving the physical drawing of the map, with his wondering, wandering ‘what if ‘naming using words ?’
As these names started to come alive in the mind of the writer, he started to hear sounds and even voices as the characters began to talk. Characters began to move about in his head.
They were seeking treasure! And is that what we all would like from our learning; treasure?
Thus the story began and became unstoppable because it was alive and real.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island was thus born and has become one of the most iconic adventure stories ever written.
As Einstein once said:‘ Curiosity is more important than knowledge.’
If you have read the book or seen one of the many film versions, then you will recall Long John Silver merrily outwitting us all, hopping about on his wooden leg.
You may shudder at Blind Pew all swathed in black, tapping his way towards us with his black spot cruelly promising sudden death; you may smile at the schooner Hispaniola whose very name conjured up images of far away places and treasure.
Robert Louis Stevenson allowed his curiosity the freedom to create a world of chance and adventure; sudden enemies and buried secrets.
Stevenson was a story teller who even dreamt stories into being and woke up to write them down as quickly as he could remember them.His Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde reads like a living, waking nightmare and so it was when he dreamt it. It was all he could do to catch it and write it down.
Curiosity allows our minds to generate different ideas, different ways of looking at the familiar, to tell stories about our world and its words, differently.
Stories encourage us to listen to others and to listen to ourselves.
Imagine a day without a single story?
Sometimes of course, we may tell a story and suddenly realize that its message is rather different than we intended or even believed. This is when we learn so much much about ourselves and others.
Stevenson’s curiosity led him to follow the directions of his imagination or his ‘fancy’ as the Romantic poets might have called it…
Think too of the Romantic poet John Keats in the second half of his wonderful poem, Lamia. Here Keats suggests that rational ‘educated/prescriptive’ thought or cold logic inhibit creativity and imagination. In fact they stifle the imagination so much that even an Angel’s wings could be clipped and render her flightless.
We can all feel flightless in our lives. Curiosity helps us to gain confidence, to grow, to fly!
Even a rainbow could be unweave{d} thus depriving the eye and nature one of its most luminous and enduring miracles!
Again, imagine how your mind feels lively, colorful and even rainbow like when you are passionately interested. By contrast there may be times when you feel that your rainbow mind has been made dull through the task and ways of thinking inflicted upon you.
You may feel in need of James Bond’s level of curiosity!
Cold philosophy is no friend to curiosity. it clips its wings, it unweaves curiosity’s capacity for rainbow thought and actions. For curiosity’s liberating capacity to dare to think otherwise.
Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine–
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade.
Here’s a video for you about the benefits of English Tuition !
