Wonder Wednesday

Reading as a Vehicle for Wonder

Dear Friends,

Last week’s post considered poetry’s role in capturing wonder, and wonder’s role in the survival of the Anthropocene. So, I thought it might be useful to revisit the role of reading in general—how we read, and what reading does to us—to better cement the relationship between wonder and literature.

In his study of aesthetic experience, Peter de Bolla argues that “Literary works of art are produced in the activity of reading.” I love the verb produced here—it seems to suggest that the reader renders the text fully alive, that the life of the text continues inside the reader’s mind. De Bolla goes on to say that though it seems logical to read a text first, and only subsequently develop an aesthetic response, “this is impossible given that the reading and the response are interactive; that is, one develops in the shadow and in step with the other.” Word by word, line by line, we metabolize what we read, and our singular reactions organically unfold. We question. We discover. What we read changes us.

When we apply the lens of wonder to this idea, we find that wonder can be passed from writer to reader through the page itself. This is no small miracle.

Aristotle (and later Aquinas) suggested that wonder catalyzes the poetic impulse by provoking a restlessness that seeks shape. The poem wants to unearth, discover, and question; it is, as Anne Carson writes, “an action of the mind captured on the page…a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking.” It shares psychic ground with the conditions of wonder—there is something unsettling, and therefore generative, about trying to wrestle into language something that exceeds it.

I’ve said it before elsewhere (indeed, it is what informed my approach for close reading poems for my dissertation) that capturing wonder’s complexity on the page requires tuning your ear to the relationship between certainty and uncertainty. Wonder resists being explained fully; it touches something inside of us that is awake to and aware of life’s essential mystery. A work that has wonder as its subject must have some degree of mimetic ambition; it must succeed at enactment rather than a summary of wonder. It must capture what English twelfth-century philosopher John of Salisbury called “marvelous singularity,” or the emotional experience of wonder. We want to guide the reader intelligibly towards the narrative conditions for wonder while leaving room for its inherent disorientation.

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake remarks that “the man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind.” The wondering mind repels such reptiles, because wonder invites deeper questioning. Wonder is self-replenishing, and reading is one of our greatest vehicles for wonder. It allows for the empathy that is central to acknowledging the preciousness of the earth, and of therefore playing an active role in preventing its destruction.

xM