"A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood."
Wonder is a beckoning. A come-hither. A lure that pulls us onto a path of knowledge. Wonder is the deliverance from a staid adulthood and a wrapped-up existence.
Wonder is best felt, not explained. Wonder is as simple as watching cows.
Each new day, when they come out from the far side of the barn, it is like the next act or the start of an entirely new play. They amble into view from the far side of the barn with their rhythmic, graceful walk, and it is an occasion, like the start of a parade.
[…]
So often they are standing completely still. Yet when I look up again a few minutes later, they are in another place, again standing completely still. Now, in the heart of winter, they spend a lot of time lying around in the snow. Does she lie down because the other two have lain down before her, or are they all three lying down because they all feel it is the right time to lie down?
From Lydia Davis Essays
Short-story writer Lydia Davis fills pages with observations of neighbor cows. Pages propelled by wonder. By a desire to learn, to know. What are they thinking? What motivates them? What do they think of me? She asks indirectly, seeking to cross what divides animals and us.
Wonder is communion. What else can it lead to?
“The wonder is,” observed Annie Dillard, a pioneer of nature wondering, “—given the errant nature of freedom and the burgeoning of texture in time—the wonder is that all the forms are not monsters, that there is beauty at all[…].”
Why is there beauty at all?
German economist and pacifist E. F. Schumacher believes that curiosity is the name for things that expand our world beyond what is essential, beyond our biological constraints, into a state of being rather than having.
It is, Schumacher continues, what separates us from the unyielding despair of met biological needs and nothing more.
Writer and biologist Rachel Carson develops a lovely case for wonder in our youth, perhaps because children's eyes are closer to the earth?
A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.
From Rachel Carson’s A Sense of Wonder
Although she spent her life connecting humans to the environment, Carson’s most beloved project contains line after line of the simplest, purest wonder as she takes her infant nephew into wildscapes.
One stormy autumn night when my nephew Roger was about twenty months old I wrapped him in a blanket and carried him down to the beach in a rainy darkness. Out there, just at the edge of where-we-couldn’t-see, big waves were thundering in, dimly seen white shapes that boomed and shouted and threw great handfuls of froth at us. Together we laughed for pure joy[…].
From Rachel Carson’s A Sense of Wonder
I walk around the garden at night with my bundled baby. Oh, the things we get up to in the wakeful hours. Does she sense the outdoors? Does she, too, feel joy?
Schumacher argues that an indescribable factor, “x,” separates us from animals, minerals, and everything else that is not divine or human. It seems that “x” is ignited by wonder. The phenomenon encapsulates it.
More than curiosity, wonder is an entrance to the possible. And impossible.
Gaston Bachelard—the wonderfully imaginative man who transformed concepts like nests, corners, and even roundness into psychological spaces and existential boundaries—writes: “The surest sign of wonder is exaggeration.” Some transcendent cosmic hand knights them, like begonia leaves, snail shells, and ammonites.
The surest sign of wonder is exaggeration. And since the inhabitant of a shell can amaze us, the imagination will soon make amazing creatures, more amazing than reality, issue from the shell. […] When we accept slight amazement, we prepare ourselves to imagine great amazement, and, in the world of the imagination, it becomes normal for an elephant, an enormous animal, to come out of a snail shell. It would be exceptional, however, if we were to ask him to go back into it.
From Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space
Did all of art, poetry, beauty, and everything made originate from wonder directed at cosmic patterns and incongruous forms?
Darwin speculated whales evolved from land mammals (he guessed bears). Later, it was proven they share common ancestors with pigs and hippos. “Hope” is positioned in a feeding dive during which she would swallow mouthfuls of plankton, the largest feeding event of any single animal. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.Indeed, science pulses with wonder. I love this passage from geneticist Paul Nurse when he describes how he was lured into biology.
It may have been a butterfly that first started me thinking seriously about biology. It was early spring; I was perhaps twelve or thirteen years old and sitting in the garden when a quivering yellow butterfly flew over the fence. It turned, hovered, and briefly settled—just long enough for me to notice the elaborate veins and spots on its wings. […] Like me, it was so obviously alive: it could move, it could sense, it could respond, it seemed so full of purpose. I found myself wondering: what does it really mean to be alive?
From Paul Nurse’s What is Life?
Our minds can contemplate the universe if we let it.
If you are a bit foggy on wonder, start with Annie Dillard, the naturalist, novelist, and all-around brilliant observer who inhales the universe:
I wonder how long it would take you to notice the regular recurrence of the seasons if you were the first man on earth. What would it be like to live in open-ended time broken only by days and nights? You could say, ‘It’s cold again; it was cold before,’ but you couldn’t make the key connection and say, ‘It was cold this time last year,’ because the notion of ‘year’ is precisely the one you lack. Assuming that you hadn’t yet noticed any orderly progression of heavenly bodies, how long would you have to live on earth before you could feel with any assurance that any one particular long period of cold would, in fact, end?
From Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Wonder is a sticky thing. A viscous thing. It is flying your way all the time like cosmic spitballs.
Should it hit you, stick to you, it might not leave. It might keep pulling you in. To cows. To stars. To cells. To anything above biological needs.
Davis continues to watch the cows:
The third comes out into the field from behind the barn when the other two have already chosen their spots, quite far apart. She can choose to join either one. She goes deliberately to that one in the far corner. Does she prefer the company of that cow, or does she prefer that corner?
Wonder is the sticky thing that pulls us onto the threshold of comprehension and pushes us over the edge into what Carson calls a “renewed excitement in living.”
Find something to wonder about. Better yet, find something to keep wondering about.