The Power of Curiosity

While I was reading the “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, I realized that Douglass and I have something in common which is curiosity. Reading chapters five through seven made me realized that Douglass was able to read out of his desire to know the unknown.

I can infer that since Douglas was little he would see people staring attentively at a piece of paper, not knowing why they did that, which made him question what it was. That got him into questioning what it was that they were doing, thus this curiosity started motivating him to learn to look at a piece of paper attentively and gain some sort of information. This is what drove Douglass to read. This reminds me of when I was around nine years old, which is the age where I started to question everything that my parents were talking about or certain things that they did. Now they couldn’t start whispering and giving weird looks while I was around because they knew that my curiosity of the unknown would drive me to finding out just like Douglass. Curiosity drove me crazy, whenever I entered my parent’s bedroom and they quickly changed the channel made me question, why did they do this? What was so terrible or inappropriate that I couldn’t know about? So that’s what made me go to another room, put on the channel that they were on and watch what they were watching. This was all do to my curiosity just like Douglas, wanting to learn how to write.

When Douglass was a slave it was “prohibited” to teach a slave how to read and write because it was “unlawful, and unsafe”. When Douglass heard these words it made him desire even more to learn how to read and write. This was the same as when my mother told my father that I couldn’t watch “Friends” of the “OC”. I would hide like Douglass in a separate room, watch these types of shows, just as he read the newspaper. Reading the newspaper, and watching “Friends” gave both of us the chance to see the unknown parts of life that society was hiding from us. My parents wanted to protect me, from the “inappropriate” things that the world had, whereas the Whites took these measure to protect themselves from the Slaves. Maybe my parents did this also to protect themselves, so I wouldn’t try to imitate all the “inappropriate” things that the cast of “Friends” or the “OC” did, especially for a nine year old.

Douglass says that “the more he read, the more he was lead to anohr and detest his enslavers”.  That sometimes he felt that “learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing” and that “in moments of agony he envied his fellow classmates for their stupidity.” (51) Sometimes it was best to be ignorant so he didn’t have to worry about what his masters were doing, or how they were violating the slaves’ human rights. This is like when top-secret information from the government is released and we know things that we weren’t meant to know. A hypothetical example would be if the United States government knew that aliens were in the world and no one else was supposed to know because people would panic and the world would turn out to be a disaster. Douglass felt that sometimes it would be nice not to know everything because this generates frustration, just like I have also felt that it would be nice to not know how real life works and pretend that everything is sunny, but just like Douglass the curiosity beats the desire of wanting to feel comfortable with reality. Is it sometimes better to be ignorant?