Topical Guide 588
Mark Dorset
Ideas: “Overly Simple”
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 9:
My immediate problem, as I now see it, was that I had acquired over the years a number of overly simple ideas, ideas based on a view of the surface of things only, and they had become too firmly rooted in my mind—the solar-system model of the atom, for example, and the sectioned-map view of social boundaries, that sort of thing.
Curiosity: Objects of One’s
Where Do You Stop? Chapter 9:
Need I tell you how distracting it is to be alone in a library? Unwatched, you must struggle continually against satisfying your curiosity about newts, heraldry, the merengue, combination locks—everything but the topic that brought you there. […]
Whenever I enter a library now I head first for the rack of new books, where some of the pleasure of the jumble still exists, before the books are made to quit the happy mix and dwell with their own kind. Having come in search of the latest biography of Wittgenstein, I’m as likely to leave with a treatise on the tube worms that dwell near thermal vents at the deepest points on the ocean floor.
See also:
Ideas: Half-Baked, Borrowed, Stolen, French TG 487
Curiosity TG 166
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