On the Fatal Effects of Female Curiosity and Disobedience

[Exhibit A]

It is not a box but a jar. This is a mistake in translation that doesn’t much matter.

Prometheus was not curious. He was a thief. This is a crime and so he is punished, duly.

Zeus tells Hephaestus and Athene to build the first woman from the moist soil of earth, and each god gives her a seductive gift.

Does it matter that she was told not to open to the jar? Was this not what woman was made to do?

She closes the lid and Hope is imprisoned. Humankind learns strife. Blame not Pandora: she does only what she was molded to do. Prometheus is the one who broke the rules. Pandora ruins the world because Prometheus gave us fire.

According to Hesiod, Athene taught her needlework and weaving. Not once does she prick her finger.

Aphrodite endowed her with grace upon her head and a cruel longing and desire the makes a body ache.

Hermes gives her a shameful mind and deceit.

Hermes gives her lies.

Hermes gives her a name—Pandora—because every Olympian god bestows upon her a gift.

Fine, Prometheus was afraid of punishment. He gave specific orders to his brother Epimetheus not to take any gifts from Zeus, but no one can refuse a lovely lady and the god of all gods.

It contains toil and how many other pains.

Therefore, Hope is a toil that Pandora saves. She is a heroine. She is a scoundrel. She is a destroyer.

[Exhibit B]

Adam is content. Eve is a problem. And then we learn shame. I keep it beside my bed, and when I turn on the lights, I see myself and blush.

[Exhibit C]

Vladimir Nabokov: Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

Thomas Hobbes: Curiosity is the lust of the mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Curiosity is lying in wait for every secret.

Thomas Aquinas: Lust for knowledge is a sinful appetite.

Curiosity, from the Latin curiositas, meaning an eagerness for knowledge.

Albert Einstein: The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reasons for existing.

Seneca: Nature gave us an innate curiosity and, aware of its own art and beauty, created us in order to be the audience of the wonderful spectacle of the world; because it would have toiled in vain, if things so great, so brilliant, so delicately traced, so splendid and variously beautiful, were displayed to an empty house.

Charles Darwin: Pure curiosity is unique to human beings.

But when is it a problem?

Curiosity is the knowledge emotion.

Alfred Tennyson: To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Benjamin Franklin: Curiosity about life in all its aspects, I think, is still the secret of creative people.

Curiosity is a cognitive ability that the brain uses to digest its environment. To unfold curiosity’s potential, cognitive tools—in particular thinking, the capacity for abstraction, and the technical skills needed to produce material tools that change the environment—must be embedded in cultural practices and anchored in social science.

Curiosity drives us forward, and I am only quoting men here.

George Steiner: We cannot choose the dreams of unknowing. We shall, I expect, open the last door in the castle even if it leads, perhaps because it leads, into realities which are beyond the reach of human comprehension and control.

Edmund Burke: The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind is curiosity. Curiosity is the most superficial of all the affectations; it changes its object perpetually, it has an appetite which is very sharp, but very easily satisfied.

Albert Einstein: I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.

Montaigne: Only fools have made up their minds and are certain.

Aristotle: All humans, by nature, desire to know.

Walt Disney: We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.

[Exhibit D]

Back in 1697, Hans Christian Andersen orated the story to the Sun King and his pals like...