Lorraine Daston Are you having fun today? Robert Merton and Elinor Barber The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A study in sociological semantics and the sociology of science Princeton: NJ, 2004, London Review of Books, 23 September 2004, p. 29 and 31.
". . . For many centuries, curiosity was a forbidden pleasure (recall Eve and Pandora), but a pleasure nonetheless. It was precisely its aimless yet addictive quality that rendered curiositas suspect among medieval and Renaissance theologians; when Thomas Aquinas wrote of the scholarly virtues, he preferred sedentary studiositas, with its diligent Sitzfleisch associations, to roaming curiositas. Even after curiosity was redeemed as an intellectual virtue in the 17th and 18th centuries, its most enthusiastic proponents admitted that it was voracious; Hobbes callled it 'a Lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continuall and indefatigable generation of Knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnall Pleasure.' Like avarice, curiosity is dangerously insatiable; like lust, it is capricious and changable in its objects. Like the scientific research it propels-and like fashion-it is hungry for novelties. Serendipity of Walpole's sort is nourished by cavalier curiosity, and its distinctive pleasures, like those of curiosity, are those of the perpetual hunt . . . the masters of serendipty are, like the princes of Serendip, on the move, if only from one book to another."
". . .
"Walpole believed serendipity to be a peculiar talent of his. He was so lacking in drive that Victorian readers of his correspondence thought him frivolous and lazy. Hazlitt pronounced Walpole's heart and mind as cluttered with curios as his house at Strawberry Hill; Macaulay was exasperated by his sloth and snobbery: 'Serious business was a trifle to him, and trifles were his serious business.' 'Serious upon trifles' is a reproach that has been hurled at naturalists and antiquarians fascinated by empirical minutiae since at least the 17th century. Leisured, rambling curiosity, indulged over decades, turned serendipity into a habit for Walpole. Despite Merton's hopes . . . there is hardly an extant institution of higher learning that would tolerate research as a life-long random walk . . . The language of serendiptiy stresses instantaneity, the moment of revelation. Yet 'moment' may be the wrong unit of time to capture the pace and workings of serendipity. There is no straight line to serendipity, only a slow, erratic amble." p. 31
[Consider the flaneur . . . ]