On Being a Busybody (5-9)

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.

So painful for all of us is the revelation of our own troubles that many die rather than reveal to physicians some hidden malady. Just imagine Herophilus[*] or Erasistratus[*] or Asclepius himself, when he was a mortal man,[*] carrying about their drugs and instruments, calling at one house after another, and inquiring whether a man had an abscess in the anus or a woman a cancer in the womb! And yet the inquisitiveness of this profession is a salutary thing. Yet everyone, I imagine, would have driven such a man away, because he does not wait to be sent for, but comes unsummoned to investigate others’ infirmities. And busybodies search out these very matters and others still worse, not to cure, but merely to expose them. For this reason they are hated deservedly. For example, we are annoyed and displeased with customs-officials, not when they pick up those articles which we are importing openly, but when in the search for concealed goods they pry into baggage and merchandize which are another’s property. And yet the law allows them to do this and they would lose[*] by not doing so. But busybodies ruin and abandon

their own interests in their excessive occupation with those of others. Only rarely do they visit the farm, for they cannot endure the quiet and silence of being alone. But if, after a long absence, they do chance to put in there, they have more of an eye for their neighbours’ vines than for their own, and they ask how many of their neighbours’ cattle have died, or how much of his wine has turned sour. But they are soon sated with such news and run away. Yet the true and genuine farmer does not care to hear even news that makes its own way from the city; he says[*]

Then he will tell me while he digs

On what terms peace was made. The cursed scamp

Now strolls around and meddles with these things.

And the busybody, shunning the country as something stale and uninteresting and undramatie, pushes into the bazaar and the market-place and the harbours: Is there any news? Weren’t you at market early this morning? Well then, do you suppose the city has changed its constitution in three hours? If, however, someone really does have something of that nature to tell him, he dismounts from his horse, grasps his informant’s hand, kisses him, and stands there listening. But if someone meets him and tells him that there is no news, he exclaims as though he were annoyed, What do you mean? Haven’t you been at market? Didn’t you pass the War Office? Didn’t you interview the new arrivals from Italy either? It is for this reason that the legislation of the Locrian magistrates was excellent. For if anyone who had been out of town came

up and asked, Is there any news? they fined him. Just as cooks[*] pray for a good crop of young animals and fishermen for a good haul of fish, in the same way busybodies pray for a good crop of calamities, a good haul of difficulties, for novelties, and changes, that they, like cooks and fishermen, may always have something to fish out or butcher.

Another good law was that of the legislator of Thurii,[*] for he forbade the lampooning on the comic stage of all citizens except adulterers and busybodies. And indeed adultery does seem to be a sort of curiosity about another’s pleasure and a searching out and examination of matters which are closely guarded and escape general observation, while curiosity is an encroaching, a debauching and denuding of secret things.

Since a natural consequence of much learning is to have much to say (and for this reason Pythagoras[*] enjoined upon the young a five years’ silence which he called a Truce to Speech), a necessary concomitant of inquisitiveness is to speak evil.[*] For what the curious delight to hear they delight to tell, and what they zealously collect from others they joyously reveal to everyone else. Consequently, in addition to its other evils, their disease actually impedes the fulfilment of their desires.[*] For everyone is on his guard to hide things from them and is reluctant to do anything while a busybody is looking, or to say anything while one is listening, but defers consultation and postpones the consideration of business until such an inquisitive person is out of

the way. And if, when either some secret matter is under discussion or some important business is being transacted, a busybody comes on the scene, men drop the matter from the discussion and conceal it, as one does a tidbit when a cat runs by. Consequently these persons are often the only ones to whom those matters are not told or shown which everyone else may hear and see.

For the same reason the busybody is deprived of everybody’s confidence[*]: we should prefer, on any account, to entrust our letters and papers and seals to slaves and strangers rather than to inquisitive friends and relatives. That noble Bellerophon[*] did not break the seal even on a letter accusing himself which he was carrying, but kept his hands from the king’s letter by reason of that same continence which kept him from the king’s wife. Inquisitiveness, in fact, is indicative of incontinence no less than is adultery, and in addition, it is indicative of terrible folly and fatuity. For to pass by so many women who are public property open to all and then to be drawn toward a woman who is kept under lock and key and is expensive, and often, if it so happens, quite ugly, is the very height of madness and insanity. And it is this same thing which busybodies do: they pass by much that is beautiful to see and to hear, many matters excellent for relaxation and amusement, and spend their time digging into other men’s trifling correspondence, gluing their ears to their neighbours’ walls, whispering with slaves and women of the streets, and often incurring danger, and always infamy.