Curiosity Needs Spacious Time.

I wrote earlier about entering Dante through a side door—a film that led me toward a poem I had long hesitated to approach. I didn’t know then how far that door would open.

Recently I found myself thinking about something I had never quite put into words:

Time can become spacious rather than merely plentiful.

There is a difference.

Plentiful time can still be filled—with appointments, obligations, things to accomplish. Spacious time has room in it. Room to wander down a street simply because you haven’t walked there in years. Room to sit over a coffee. Room to read one canto of Dante and then spend an hour wondering about something you found there.
Perhaps that is what curiosity requires.
Not long ago, I watched Julian Schnabel’s In the Hand of Dante. It sent me to Nick Tosches’s novel, which in turn has sent me back to Dante’s Divine Comedy with an entirely different understanding of what I am reading.
The three have begun to speak to one another.

Tosches helps me see the man behind the Inferno: Dante in exile, his world disrupted, trying to make sense of disorder by imagining a universe in which everything has its place and its consequence. Schnabel takes Tosches’s unruly meditation on Dante and makes something different from it again. And then I return to Dante and notice things I might otherwise have passed by.

There is no particular destination in all this. I don’t need to finish the Divine Comedy by a certain date. I can read a canto, follow a reference, return to Tosches, watch Schnabel again, and see where the conversation takes me.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have done that at another time in my life. There were too many things that needed doing.

Now I have discovered the pleasure of spacious time.

It allows one thing to lead to another. A film to a novel. A novel to a seven-hundred-year-old poem. A morning walk to a house that unexpectedly brings back someone you knew long ago.

None of these connections needs to lead anywhere useful.

It is enough to notice them.

Curiosity needs spacious time.

And perhaps the invitation is simply this: when something catches your attention, don’t hurry past it.

See where it takes you