On Being a Busybody (5-6)

What escape is there, then, from this vice? By a process of shifting and diverting our inquisitiveness, as has been said,[*] and, if possible, by turning the soul to better and more pleasant subjects. Direct your curiosity to heavenly things and things on earth, in the air, in the sea. Are you by nature fond of small or of great spectacles? If of great ones, apply your curiosity to the sun: where does it set and whence does it rise? Inquire into the changes in the moon, as you would into those of a human being: what becomes of all the light she has spent and from what source did she regain it, how does it happen that

When out of darkness first she comes anew,

She shows her face increasing fair and full;

And when she reaches once her brightest sheen,

Again she wastes away and comes to naught?[*]

And these are secrets of Nature, yet Nature is not vexed with those who find them out. Or suppose you have renounced great things. Then turn your curiosity to smaller ones: how are some plants always blooming and green and rejoicing in the display of their wealth at every season, while others are sometimes like these, but at other times, like a human spendthrift, they squander all at once their abundance and are left bare and beggared? Why, again, do some plants produce elongated fruits, others angular, and still others round and globular?

But perhaps you will have no curiosity about these subjects since there is nothing evil in them. Yet if your zest for meddling must by all means be for ever feeding and dwelling on depraved things, like a maggot on dead matter, let us escort it to history and supply it with an unstinted abundance of evils. For there you will find

The deaths of men, the shufflings off of life,[*]

seductions of women, assaults of slaves, slanders of friends, compounding of poisons, envies, jealousies, shipwrecks of households, overthrow of empires. Glut and enjoy yourself and cause no trouble or pain to any of your associates!

But curiosity apparently takes no pleasure in stale calamities, but wants them hot and fresh; it enjoys the spectacle of novel tragedies and has not much zest for association with the comic and more cheerful side of life. Consequently when anyone tells the tale of a wedding or a sacrifice or a complimentary escort, the busybody is a careless and inattentive listener, and declares that he has already heard most of the details and urges the narrator to

cut them short or skip them. But if someone sitting near at hand narrates the seduction of a maiden or the adultery of a wife or the framing of a law-suit or a quarrel of brothers, the busybody neither dozes off to sleep nor pleads an engagement,

But asks more speech and proffers both his ears[*];

and that saying,[*]

Alas!

How much more readily than glad events

Is mischance carried to the ears of men!

is spoken truly when applied to busy bodies. For as cupping-glasses[*] draw from the flesh what is worst in it, so the ears of busy bodies attract the most evil stories. Or rather, as cities have certain unlucky and dismal gates through which they lead out condemned criminals and cast out the refuse[*] and the scapegoats, while nothing undefiled or sacred either goes in or out through them, so also the ears of busy bodies give passage and thoroughfare to nothing good or decent, but only to gruesome tales, serving, as they do, as conveyance for foul and polluted narratives.

The only song that’s heard within my house

Is wailing cries.[*]

This is the one Muse and Siren for busybodies, this is the sweetest of all music to their ears.

For curiosity is really a passion for finding out whatever is hidden and concealed, and no one conceals a good thing when he has it; why, people even pretend to have good things when they have them

not. Since, then, it is the searching out of troubles that the busybody desires, he is possessed by the affliction called malignancy,[*] brother to envy and spite. For envy is pain at another’s good, while malignancy is joy at another’s evil[*]; and both spring from a savage and bestial affliction, a vicious nature.