A funny thing about curiosity

The Green Apple, Georgia O’Keefe, 1922

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Yesterday, listening to Talking Heads while making meatballs with the kids, I realized I have forgotten how curiosity is supposed to feel.

The last few months my desire to know and to learn has been tuned way down. I found Wittgenstein’s Brown and Blue Notebooks somewhat interesting in November, but after 41 pages, I couldn’t make myself go on. Everything has been like that.

I thought my numbness was due to all the work I had to do in September, October, November: wrapping up at the art gallery, getting a heating system for the house, changing the roof. But no. Now a month has passed since I finished the work; I’m no longer tired—and I still can’t get curious about anything.

Being curious is important to me. Not only because it is how I get ideas for essays. It feels to me like everyone has something unrepeatable to bring into the world. And we can manifest it by going in our direction of maximal interestingness. The pattern we make as our curiosity pulls us hither and thither like a dog chasing a smell across a field—that pattern is a gift we give the world.

So, finding the world uninteresting, I feel ungenerous in a way. I’m the blinking dot when ChatGPT fails to generate. In an important sense, I’m not alive.

Anyway, this was what I was feeling before I sat down to chop onions while the kids rolled meatballs. Talking Heads were playing in the background and, as Johanna showed the three-year-old how not to make her meatballs as big as tangerines, I sang along:

Everyone is trying to get to the bar
The name of the bar, the bar is called Heaven
The band in Heaven, they play my favorite song
Play it one more time, play it all night long

Oh, Heaven
Heaven is the place
A place where nothing
Nothing ever happens

How can David Byrne come up with lyrics like these? I thought. It is so good, but it must have seemed like such a silly little thing when it first occurred to him: a bar named Heaven where the party, when it is over, “will start again / Will not be any different, will be exactly the same.” I don’t think I would have allowed myself to lean into that idea—and yet, when Byrne does, it just opens up and up and I feel these vast emotions.

Whatever the seed was for “Heaven,” I thought, how did he figure out that it was worth pursuing?

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Later (frying meatballs), I realized that On Some Faraway Beach, a biography of Brian Eno, might have a clue. Eno produced Fear Music (1979), the record where “Heaven” appears.

I couldn’t find much—the idea for the song came, quite literally, from seeing a bar called Heaven.

But then I read this passage about “I Zimbra,” the lead single from Fear Music, which was what made me realize I had been stupid about my curiosity and how to recognize what to pursue:

[“I Zimbra”] was based on a riff Byrne had copped from a South African album by Sasha and Jackey called 17 Mabone, which he’d picked up ‘because the cover had a drawing of a car with seventeen headlights on it’. Musically, it was potentially the strongest thing on the album, but Byrne was blocked, words simply weren’t coming. […] With the album deadline looming and no finished lyric, Eno […] urged Byrne to use a ‘found text.’

[…] Eno presented Byrne with a nonsense text by Ball called ‘Gaji beri bimba’ that he’d found in a compendium of Dadaist writings. It looked forbidding on paper, ‘A bim beri glassala grandrid E glassala tuffm I zimbra’, but when chanted, the bizarre words took on an uncanny musicality. […] Thus was ‘I Zimbra’ successfully completed[.]

Oh, I thought shaking my meatballs.

Oh.

I’ve been such an idiot.

The reason nothing has felt interesting to me, I thought, is that I’ve forgotten the most important thing for me: the path of maximal interestingness is supposed to feel like fun. Not fun as in “I feel entertained” but fun as in, “this is engrossing and self-surprising, life-affirming and a little scary.” Fun, the way Eno and Byrne are having fun in the quote above.

Over the last six months, as I’ve been looking for things that will interest me, I’ve done it coldly. I’ve kept a list of things that makes me say, “Hm. That’s interesting.” That is, I’ve looked for things that match the pattern of how an Interesting Idea is supposed to look. But I’ve forgotten to ask myself what feels interesting, as in, “I can’t explain why, but this car with seventeen headlights is just really fascinating to me.”

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Here’s a funny thing: when I ask myself, “What is the most amusing thing I could do next?” the ideas that occur to me feel . . . interesting. A lot more interesting than the ideas I get when looking for the interesting.

Thinking about it a bit more, I realize that looking for the fun is a special case of a more general insight. There are other emotional cues that point toward the interesting, besides fun. Laura Deming, for example, describes her curiosity as a kind of rage (“but what in Newton’s name is heat actually????? What is temperature????”).

The more general point, then, is: interestingness, the compulsion to know, is not a property of an idea; it is a cluster of emotions. You can’t go looking for interesting ideas, not directly. You have to look for that thing that surges up in you—surges like rage, like laughter, like sadness—when you encounter clues.

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I notice that I feel embarrassed by the ideas I get when I ask myself what would be funny to write about. The ideas feel odd (a review of underrated grammatical tense forms, an essay exploring the image of transparent ice) and I can’t explain why they excite me. They feel elliptical and, well, not like the kind of thing I should be writing.

Noticing this makes me realize another reason I’ve been out of it. I have fallen for the cardinal sin when looking for interestingness: I’ve wanted what I find interesting to be interesting to others, too. Even at the first larval stage. I’ve wanted, in an unarticulated way, to be able to point at ideas that fascinate me and have people say, “Wow, Henrik, you are reading Wittgenstein and thinking about LLMs! You have such talent for being interested in interesting things!”

In particular, I get nervous by the fact that some fiendishly well-read people who I used to admire from afar read my essays these days. This is embarrasing to admit but ~50 percent of the reason I read John Stuart Mill, Proust, and research papers about character training for language models is that I model that it is what they’d be curious about.¹

It is easy to mistake status-seeking for curiosity.

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Our three-year-old, Rebecka, is drawing “a map of our island.” She picks up a pencil—the one closest at hand—and just gets a line going. Her attitude, fiercely concentrated, is boundlessly confident, like, “Of course, this is where the line should be, no doubt about it.” She twists the line all over the page with her face frowning. Then, just as abruptly, she lifts the pencil and is done.

In a year or two, she will become self-aware. Her drawings will start to look like childhood kitsch (standardized stick figures, square houses with triangular roofs) and they will stay boring for years, until, as Heinrich von Kleist said, she has walked around the earth and reentered paradise from the backdoor; until she has regained, as an adult, the serious play she has now.

But even that is not enough. I have climbed back into Eden at times, but each morning I wake up outside again. You have to keep climbing in.

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There is something frustratingly Tao about curiosity. (1) It is by following your curiosity that you can bring something new and beautiful into the world as a gift to others. But (2) to go there you have to do things that you fear others will think are stupid or embarrassing. That is, you can only find the Tao by not looking for the Tao. By losing yourself in your line.

On that note, I have a story about one of the people who makes me nervous because he reads my blog. Let’s call him K.

When I started the blog, my dream was to write something as good as K’s essays. I wanted to have insights that would interest him (I see that now). But I couldn’t. When I tried to do the kind of sustained, disciplined research he does, I wore myself out and failed.

In December 2022, sometime after it had dawned on me that I could not do what I wanted, I got ill. I spent three weeks in bed with a fever that made it impossible to think, talk, or read. Staying three weeks in a state where you can’t form coherent thoughts nor make connections with the outside world—it is an odd experience. You have the leisure to forget half of who you are.

When I got up, after Christmas, the fields below the house were empty and white, and my past life felt gone, like a dream fading in the light. I didn’t understand why I had wanted to be a writer so badly; it couldn’t matter less. There were pheasants in the field. There were roe deer.

In that ethereal and contended state, I wrote a piece about my wife Johanna called “Looking for Alice.” It was about as far from the type of essay I had wanted to write as possible. I thought it was embarrassing, honestly. But it felt like a silly dance move and amused me. I gave it to Steve Krouse, as a belated Christmas gift.

Then, as I’ve told before, Steve leaked it.

Two months later, I received an email. The sender wanted to tell me that he loved an essay of mine, “Looking for Alice.” I looked at the name signed at the bottom. It was K.

Pretty Tao.

The irony of the story, of course, is that I then proceeded to look for ideas that would impress him.

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I wrote this 10 days ago and since then I’ve been happy and filled with ideas again. I’m not sure if remembering that interestingness = fun for me was what enabled that. But I think it helped.

Thank you, Esha, for helping me finish the piece.

1. To be clear, there is nothing wrong in making things that are interesting to other people. But, to borrow an insight from Brian Eno, the best way to do that is to follow your curiosity and then build a frame around the result so it makes sense to others afterward.

Also, I do to an extent love that I’ve put myself in a position where I’m peer pressured to read Wittgentstein. It is a milieu I have cultivated consciously. But everything can be done in excess. First you shape your social graph; then it shapes you—yes, but I want to be in the driver seat of that shaping.