Dear Friends,
It’s a hard week to write about wonder, but I began the day thinking that it’s moments like these that ask us to recommit to what is best about humanity, in the face of so much evidence of what is worst.
It was always my hope to study wonder not merely through an aesthetic or critical lens, but as a fundamental aptitude and resonance in our human experience. Today, I want to revisit the writings of thinkers who, to my mind, summed up the stakes of wonder as a vehicle for empathy.
Rachel Carson said that “the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race,”[1] and I stand by her thinking that wonder and humility are incompatible with a lust for exploitation. If we can wonder at the unlikeliness and singularity of a human life, then we safeguard against the impulse for violence. St. Thomas Aquinas also connected wonder with pleasure and desire “that culminates not so much in knowledge as in encounter with majesty,”[2] waking us to what is most essentially human in us, and what is most capable of feeling.
Reflecting on this quality in Wordsworth’s writings, Kate Rigby argued that the reader is “restored to a sense of wonderment before that which we cannot grasp,” which in turn allows us to “be better placed to live respectfully amongst a diversity of more-than-human-others, without seeking always to subsume them to our own ends and understanding.”[3]
In his seminal work on wonder, Hepburn defined “a close affinity between the attitude of wonder itself—non-exploitative, non-utilitarian—and attitudes that seek to affirm and to respect other-being,” positing that the more deeply one wonders, the less predisposed one is to wanton violence.[4]
The more we develop our capacity to wonder, the greater the hope that we will see our interconnectedness and protect and value one another.
I am thinking of you as we all process and grieve the violence unfolding in our world.
xM
[1] Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, (New York: Mariner Books, 2003), p. xix.
[2] Bynum, p. 10.
[3] Rigby, p. 12.
[4] Hepburn, p. 15.
Beautifully thought out and written Maya, thank you, this Wendell Berry poem comes to mind. But of course one must have freedom for this experience to be possible....♥️
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
This ties in with CURIOSITY -
CURIOSITY
I was curious –
Why is the sky blue?
I was curious –
Why am I me and you you?
I was curious –
about everything I could do.
Now my aged curiosity slumbers
to be awakened by the trivial and the trite.
I want to be stirred
by some revealing exploration
to lead me from the loneliness of the night.
© 2022 Larry Kilham