I have just returned home from a weekend at Sarum College in Salisbury where a number of people from across the country gathered to explore the poetry of George Herbert. We were certainly fortunate to have as our guide Professor Helen Wilcox who is an important intellectual figure in understanding the poetry of Herbert. We had some fun in opening up these pieces of poetry, putting them into context and exploring their meaning through the range of metaphors and descriptions Herbert shares concerning both our inner and outer lives.

I came back home to finish the final pages of this substantial book which isn’t an entirely easy read but in its demands upon this reader it bore some fruit. Each of these 17 chapters are entitled with a short organising question (Who am I? What can we possess? What do I want to know?) and explore our human nature through the writers personal, historical, poetic, and imaginative journey. He invites his reader to consider what drives us and what we might be becoming.

It is significant to note that the author has lived in multiple countries. The son of a diplomat who experienced living in various places he has been shaped by a range of influences. In these chapters he understands the complexity of identity and culture and sets about breaking aopen the constraints of a constructed linear experience of time and space.

The text of our lives he argues is fragmented. It is the source of endless curiosity as we experience time and space as part of the collective imagination. it is tough, confusing and sometimes painful.

This text is not entirely easy to read. It combines history and fiction with personal memory to argue that thought is a complex and temporal geography. What unit us is a shared interest in curiosity and we are invited into a deeper exploration of a number of questions which are interestingly always posed in the first person plural.

The author uses his own experience imaginatively. The creativity and artistry in the use of his language to capture situations and pictures make him a wise guide. There is something of an extraordinary polymath in the way in which he opens up each thematic chapter. Part philosophy, part autobiography, part cultural theory, the journey the reader is taken on demands some stamina and care! It is clear for Manguel, that much of our early childhood experiences shape the way we engage with the world around us and our ability to befriend these curious questions.

Manguel draws on another traveler: Dante and his, The Divine Comedy. We are shown that our lives and the weaving of our story involves an intricate combination of the historical, contemporary, personal, and the universal and imaginative experience. Perhaps I should not have been disappointed therefore to learn that there are few answers in curiosity. We are born storytellers but our communications are often troubled and just unclear as truth, perspective and wisdom so easily slip through our hearts and heads.

This is a great guide on some fundamental and difficult questions. This reader will return to the text for further illumination. There are some tools here which I think are required for us all to venture into where curiosity might take us. We might all become wiser and more compassionate if we dwelt more intentionally with some of the excursions that lead us into an adventure driven by a single and timeless word: Why ?

To return to the work of Sarum College as we explore what this next chapter of our life might look like in relation to by educational offer. In an age where theology seems less of a trusted discipline in terms of equipping individuals for their life and work we might do well to take a longer and deeper look into the nature of learning and explore what questions might excite curiosity, wisdom and our shared commitment to truth.