"Creatures whose mainspring is curiosity enjoy the accumulating of facts far more than the pausing at times to reflect on those facts"
About this Quote
Curiosity, in Clarence Day's hands, isn't automatically a virtue; it's a kind of busy machinery. Calling it a "mainspring" turns the curious person into a wound-up creature, powered less by wisdom than by an inner compulsion to keep moving. The line lands as a genteel indictment of the collector mentality: the type who treats knowledge like stamps, savoring acquisition while quietly avoiding the harder, slower work of interpretation.
Day is also poking at a familiar self-deception. "Accumulating of facts" sounds industrious, almost moral. "Pausing...to reflect" sounds like idling. The subtext is that modern life (even in Day's early-20th-century moment) rewards the appearance of mental activity: reading widely, gathering trivia, staying informed. Reflection, by contrast, is private, unquantifiable, and potentially unsettling. If you stop, you might discover the facts don't add up to meaning, or that meaning demands a choice, a stance, a responsibility.
The syntax does part of the argument. The sentence itself piles up, then hesitates: "far more than the pausing at times..". It's a tiny enactment of the problem, a mind reluctant to slow down. Day, a writer known for social observation and domestic satire, is circling a class-coded habit too: the well-read conversationalist who can dazzle at dinner but never risks the vulnerability of conclusions.
It's a warning that curiosity without reflection becomes not enlightenment but escape: motion mistaken for progress.
Day is also poking at a familiar self-deception. "Accumulating of facts" sounds industrious, almost moral. "Pausing...to reflect" sounds like idling. The subtext is that modern life (even in Day's early-20th-century moment) rewards the appearance of mental activity: reading widely, gathering trivia, staying informed. Reflection, by contrast, is private, unquantifiable, and potentially unsettling. If you stop, you might discover the facts don't add up to meaning, or that meaning demands a choice, a stance, a responsibility.
The syntax does part of the argument. The sentence itself piles up, then hesitates: "far more than the pausing at times..". It's a tiny enactment of the problem, a mind reluctant to slow down. Day, a writer known for social observation and domestic satire, is circling a class-coded habit too: the well-read conversationalist who can dazzle at dinner but never risks the vulnerability of conclusions.
It's a warning that curiosity without reflection becomes not enlightenment but escape: motion mistaken for progress.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
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