In Kim Todd’s Curious, not once did she mention the common phrase, curiosity killed the cat. Instead, Todd points out some of history’s lessons regarding curiosity: “Don’t unlock the door. Don’t open the box. Don’t eat the apple. Fairy tales, Greek myths, and biblical stories caution against giving curiosity free rein” (Todd 275). Yes, curiosity has been ill-advised in the past and can lead to bad things, but where would we be without it? What if Christopher Columbus hadn’t traversed the Atlantic Ocean to discover the New World? What if students here at Georgia Tech weren’t conducting research? Curiosity drives innovation and expansion, and at the very least yields valuable results from trial and error. Without it, we humans would just be biding our time here on Earth.
Just ask Curious George. While his curiosity gets him into sticky situations, he always learns a valuable lesson afterwards. Therefore curiosity is valuable. Curiosity is dangerous, but necessary. I can’t say the same thing for the poor cat, but he has multiple lives…
Todd argues the same point that curiosity has value. I think that is why she ends her piece with a cliffhanger. When she spots a possible Surinam toad in the Brownsberg Nature Park, Todd could have captured the toad to confirm her suspicion, but the mystery itself is more intriguing to the audience and demonstrates the value of curiosity. Todd’s curiosity and wonder, combined with the way she writes about how the toad left in an instant, never to be seen again, intrigues the reader and gives the reader his or her own sense of curiosity. The value in this is that our brains are stimulated enough so that we want to learn more.
That is the point right? Curiosity springs from new and surprising knowledge. When we hear a fun fact or read an interesting news article, we often times want to take a look behind the scenes. There is no strict explanation as to why we are curious. Simply put, we we are curious because we all share the curiosity-emotion. A happy coincidence is that curiosity is necessary for survival and and genuine progress. After all, “one of the things that makes us most curious is the suggestion that the world isn’t how we think it is, that our categories are the wrong ones, and the promise is that the answer to our questions will give us a different, fuller, better view” (Todd 279). Curiosity does not hinder development, curiosity enhances it. I personally believe that the sole meaning of life is to acquire as much knowledge as we can so that we can better the lives of our offspring and provide them with a higher standard of living. After all, if there isn’t some higher purpose for our creation, then why would we waste our lives away without gaining wisdom, experience, and knowledge? It is more than survival and basic nature, it is our moral and civic duty to be curious, to push the boundaries, to improve the lives of others.