“Just something I’d like you to see.” That was all the explanation I had given my
ten year-old daughter. In the car Maya
tried to guess. At first she speculated
excitedly: the amusement park? a movie?
street fair, hike, zoo? Then she grew
suspicious: “Not another one of your museums,
Daddy!” My museums. This was Maya’s economical way of expressing disgust
and my responsibility for it. Well, I do sometimes make her do things that
serve up profit and, despite my hopes, no delight. It’s bad enough to tell your child that the
Brussels sprouts are good for her, but it’s dishonest to insist that they taste
good.
I
parked the car a block away so we would have walk down a side street then turn
a corner before Maya saw it.
Just
inside the city limits, in the middle of an affluent neighborhood of Victorian
houses, I had once stumbled on this park.
It is an oval of tended grass surrounded by mature copper beeches, twelve
of them. No slides, swings, benches. Just silence, grass, and those dozen
patriarchs.
I
wanted my daughter to see the trees and I wanted to look at them too and feel
the peace of the park. My favorite trees
and I’d never seen so many perfect specimens of in one place. Fagus
sylvatica purpurea is my favorite tree.
It does you good to look at beeches, instead of reading the newspaper,
for instance. Trees are admirable
beings. “Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does,” Shaw
wrote.
The
bark of copper beeches is smooth and gray.
Their trunks grow thick and remind you of fragments of heroic
statues. Their leaves vary: deep purple, brilliant red, burnished bronze,
coppery orange. The dozen beeches in
this pocket park are old, uniformly broad, rounded, symmetrical, colossal. Their inviting branches begin a little above
head-height for a child of ten. As we age we give up even the desire to climb
trees. If our distant ancestors were at
home swinging through the canopy, then it’s a case of ontogeny recapitulating
phylogeny.
Maya
stared at the park, the trees. She halted, arms a little out from her sides,
eyes big as they could get in the effort to take it all in at once. I kept my
mouth shut. To see is what I wanted her
to do, not listen, except to the quiet.
Maya
is captivated by Disney movies and enthralled by trapeze artists. But neither Cinderella nor circus
performers—man-made things —elicited from her the reaction she had to those
centenarian beeches, an elemental response drawn by living things made of real
elements. The trees couldn’t care less
about entertaining her.
Maya
stood stock still for nearly ten seconds, a perfect emblem of astonished
wonder, then gave a yelp and ran to embrace the nearest trunk, to grasp the
lowest branch.
“Philosophy
begins in wonder,” Plato declares in Theatetus.
The Greek word thauma does mean
wonder or marvel, but carries also a suggestion of puzzle or problem. To Plato the fitting, perhaps the most human,
response to wonder is to get rid of it.
Wonder, conceived as a hyped-up version of curiosity, is the beginning
of inquiry for philosophers who used also to be scientists.
Scientists
like talking about the wonder they felt in childhood, wonder at the natural
world, like Maya’s when confronted by a dozen beeches. The proto-scientists are the kind of kids who
asked questions about the life expectancy of a Tyrannosaurus Rex or what goes
on inside a black hole. When they grow
up they set about looking for answers.
These are the enchanted who become the disenchanters. In a sense, scientists strive to turn the
sublime into the ordinary; and yet I think for the most devoted scientists even
demystifying the ineffable won’t do away with wonder. How could it when wonder, and the ambition to
probe its causes, is the very thing that keeps their shoulders at the wheel? “I
want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are details,” Einstein confessed.
A
scientist’s wonder is active. But what
of my ten-year-old with her big eyes, open mouth, those outstretched arms? Will her wonder be passive and not a spur to
further investigation? Have the two
cultures got their own species of wonder?
Is the passive sort poetic—that is, a feeling sufficient unto
itself? Well, maybe.
There
was a child went forth every day,
And
the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,
And
that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of
the
day,
Or
for many years or stretching cycles of years.
Whitman’s sallying child assimilates
indiscriminately, appropriates but doesn’t organize a program of research into
“the early lilacs” or the “old drunkard staggering home from the
outhouse.” Whitman makes no distinction
between the natural and social worlds, outer and inner, artificial and organic,
custom or season. All existence is
equally wonderful to him. Unlike the
child who grows up and goes forth to conduct field work, whose wonder becomes,
so to speak, professionalized, Whitman’s child—clearly Whitman himself—cleaves
to the unmediated wonder of childhood, gobbling up the world, living every day
as though it were the first, like those youthful Aquarian revolutionaries of a
decade back. Whitman concludes his poem
by closing the circle but, still open, includes a tangent:
.
. .that child who went forth every day and who
now
goes and will always go forth every day.
What a contrast between Whitman’s open lines
of free verse, the democratic vistas of his prosody, and, say, Philip Larkin’s
regular rhymes and iambs, between Whitman’s enchanting cosmos and Larkin’s
cramped, class-conscious world. Larkin’s
“Vers de Société” is about the
passing of religious wonder, of childlike faith, of a solitude that is
sufficient unto itself. In this
disenchanted world, virtues are social, vices personal, and hermits are selfish
nutters. God and Whitman’s wonder are
both absent. Larkin’s opening stanza is unforgettable and clever, yet too jaded
to be really humorous:
My
wife and I have asked a crowd of craps
To
come and waste their time and ours: perhaps
You’d
care to join us? In a pig’s
arse, friend.
Day comes to an end.
The gas fire breathes, the trees
are darkly swayed.
And so Dear Warlock-Williams: I’m afraid—
What
begins as a refusal of against the hollow and wonderless social world winds up
with resignation to a suburban soirée
as a wretched substitute, even gratitude for the escape it will afford from the
self’s fiascos and regrets. In place of wonder, we get this anxious,
all-too-convincing faute de mieux:
Only the young can be alone
freely.
The time is shorter now for
company,
And sitting by a lamp more often
brings
Not peace, but other things.
Beyond the light stand failure
and remorse
Whispering Dear Warlock-Williams: Why, of course—
Like
so many things we feel or do not feel or once felt but don’t feel any more,
wonder is a function of perspective.
Reckoned from the moment of the Big Bang what could be more marvelous
than my bicycle, or a bagel, or the First Barbary War? Sub
specie aeternitatis what isn’t a
wonder? But the narrower your focus in
space and time, the more things become normal—a bike, a bagel, slaughter going
on somewhere. Not only is the next
moment usually indistinguishable from the ones before and after, but the
context of all three includes countless facts, beliefs, arrangements—wonders
looked at one way but now commonplace, mere conditions of life, like gravity
and summer, telephones, jet planes, bananas, the two-party system.
There
are different views from the aeternitatis
perspective, notably Spinoza’s. To him,
the wonders of the cosmos are not contingent but unfold with Euclidean logic,
in accord with the iron necessity of axiom and corollary. It is an admirable system. One can’t help being impressed by Spinoza’s
determination that everything should make fine sense. In the seventeenth century, I imagine, making
sense of matters was much the thing, for Empiricists no less than
Rationalists. Spinoza too has a brand of
wonder; it is a kind of pantheistic praying.
It’s as if the beauty of a copper beech might be arrived at by
deduction. Can a pantheist can love a
copper beech, or God?
A
few years ago Thomas Nagel wrote an attractive article called “The
Absurd.” It is the obverse of Spinoza’s
ethics. Professor Nagel proposes a kind
of consoling existentialism or at least one without crisis or angst. This is
how it ends:
If
sub specie aeternitatis there is no
reason to believe that anything
matters,
then that does not matter either, and we can approach our
absurd
lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.
Here sounds a truly contemporary chord. Kierkegaard’s faith and Camus’ solidarity are
put quietly away in the attic, with the rest of the abandoned exercise
equipment. Is irony—superb balm though
it is—really better than heroism or even despair? For that matter, will irony save you from
either?
I
wonder.
According
to my Oxford Universal Dictionary,
the etymology of “wonder” is “unknown.”
(One can only wonder.)
The
Anglo-Saxons used different the vowels (“wundor”) but the meaning’s the same.
I
also learned that the phrase “in the name of wonder” was once used to lend
emphasis to the question that followed it:
“In the name of wonder, Sir, has the Great Fire of London gone out yet?”
Wonder
can be a noun, a verb, an action, an event, an building, a genius, a
feeling. The last is what chiefly
interests me, and the O.U.D., never
at a loss, explains it this way:
.
. .the emotion excited by the perception of something novel and
unexpected,
or inexplicable; astonishment mingled with perplexity or
bewildered
curiosity.
That covers it, I’d say, everything from
Maya’s standing still (astonished = to be turned to stone) to Einstein’s
shaking his terrific head and giving us his famous dictum: “The eternal mystery of the world is its
comprehensibility.”
Wonder,
then, is something inward provoked by something outward—except for those times
when we wonder at the peculiarities of our private thoughts and public
behavior. Wonder can be low or lofty,
anything from idle speculation (“I wonder who’s kissing her now”) to the awe we
feel watching an impossible over-the-shoulder catch or gazing at a few million
stars. When our perspective has narrowed
like our prospects and we are, in the worst sense, grown up, we lose our capacity
for wonder. That is, I suppose, what happened to the actor George Sanders. Five years ago he began his suicide note,
“Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored.”
Of
course Sanders wasn’t simply
bored. After his death, an old colleague
reported that fifteen years earlier his friend had declared the intention to
kill himself when he reached sixty-five—which he did, right on time. Depressing enough to hit sixty-five, but you
have to add in the failed marriages and the declining career. Nevertheless, Sanders’ case cannot be
dismissed as purely clinical; he blaming boredom gives it a moral
dimension. It’s as if Sanders had
reached the terminal stage of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic life, exhausting all of
hedonism’s permutations, weighed down by the pointlessness of repetition,
feeling life as mechanical with no spiritual dimension. Existence without wonder. The world, no doubt, had become
all-too-intelligible to him. That’s how
it must be for the deeply cynical. I can imagine how, at the end, Sanders’
perspective would have contracted to the dimensions that hotel room in
Casadelldefels and the little bottle of Nembutal tablets by the bed.
There
are others whose perspective does not contract, not even to the dimensions of
their own disciplines. For that reason
they retain, notwithstanding their mental sophistication, a child’s
wonder. Such people tend themselves to
be wonders. How different they are from les
mort d’ennui. These artists,
scientists, and saints also seem to grasp their kinship. I name Einstein and Kafka, contemporaries on
the ground floor of modernism. Both
never lost touch with the wonder whose evaporation Larkin made poetic, on which
Sanders acted. Thus, Einstein:
The
most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
It
is the source of all true art and all science.
He to whom this
emotion
is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and
stand
rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his
eyes are closed.
Franz
Kafka also understood art and science as proceeding from the same
source—wonder, mystery, a person’s desire, as he puts it, “to rush beyond the
limitations of his own small self.”
Thomas Mann called Kafka “a religious humorist.” Somewhere I wrote of him as “an athletic
agnostic.” But one can say of such labels
what Kafka himself did of a certain writer:
“Whatever he says something is always left out.”
One
afternoon Kafka met his young friend Gustav Janouch in Prague’s Franciscan
Church of The Virgin of the Snows. They spoke about the historic building. The
setting must have prompted Kafka to speak of religion, of miracles, or the urge
that underpins religion, art, and science.
Janouch, as usual, paid careful attention.
Miracles
and violence are simply the two extremes of a lack of
faith. Men waste their lives in passive expectation
of some
miraculous
directive, which never comes, precisely because our ears
are
closed to it. . .
Janouch asked Kafka “What is right?” Kafka
pointed to an old woman kneeling in a lady chapel. “Prayer,” he said and drew
the young man outside before replying at length, like Einstein but even more
like Kafka:
Prayer,
art, and scientific research are three different flames
that
leap up from the same hearth. . . Art and prayer are only hands
outstretched
in the dark. . .
“And science?” Janouch asked.
It
is the same begging hand as prayer. Man
throws himself into
the
dark rainbow which spans dying and living, in order to offer
existence
a home in the cradle of his little ego. That is what
science,
art, and prayer all do.
Janouch ends his account here. He does not record his reaction; but, if I
were Janouch, I would have looked at the tall, doomed, tubercular Kafka with
wonder.
Wonder
requires open hands, open ears, open everything.
Why
not open our eyes and our ears? Why not
stretch out a hand in the dark? It’s
impossible to deny that the world is a terrible place with deadly dinner
parties and lethal hotel rooms. But the
world also has its little girls and copper beeches. So it is wonderful.
______________________
Editor’s Note
This
piece dates from 1977. I found it, with the archaic word Wundor at its head, in his file for that year. The essay is in
holograph; Fein never typed it up. His
daughter was born in 1967 and George Sanders died in 1972. Professor Thomas Nagel’s essay, “The Absurd,”
appeared in The Journal of Philosophy,
Volume 68, No. 20, in 1971.
Like
many of Fein’s unpublished essays, this one feels like an improvisation, a
riff, n abandoned train of thought, not fully complete or polished. About the many quotations and allusions, it
is hard to say if they were deliberately chosen, the result of free
association, or if they reflect what Fein chanced to be reading at the time,
the Larkin poem perhaps. Fein does not
always let us know what set him off, but in this instance, what evidently got
him thinking about wonder was the visit to the park with the copper beeches. When I showed the essay to Maya, she told me
she remembered the day very well. She
also recalled that, at her father’s funeral, an old friend told her that
sometime in the Sixties, when he had become depressed over the state of the
world, her father advised him to “listen to the news less and look more at
trees.”
It
may seem surprising that Sidney Fein would express anything other than full
agreement with Professor Nagel’s celebrated essay and its prescription to
adopt, in the face of an indifferent universe, an attitude of irony. On reflection though, I think it may be just
because, as an ironist himself, he understood the limitations of such a stance
toward life. Then again, maybe it is
only that, in writing in praise of wonder, Fein felt bound to be ironic about
irony.
The
essay’s own irony derives from the contrast it sets up between the world-weary
Englishmen Larkin and Sanders on the one side and, on the other, the
deracinated Continental Jews Einstein and Kafka. It is tempting to say that Fein gives his heart
to the latter. His admiration for Einstein
and Kafka is obvious; he quotes both at length and savors their words. Nevertheless, I think it would be wrong to
suppose Fein is without sympathy for Larkin and even Sanders. He was not unfamiliar with faithlessness and
boredom or immune to thoughts of suicide. In 1977 he had just turned
thirty-five, a dangerous age for some men.
He depicts wonder as an exceptional state, seen at its purest in
children. Loss of faith and ennui are
two of the perils of middle age. Yet he
insists wonder is not puerile. Wonder
like Whitman’s requires an openness to the glories and variety of the world, an
inward condition provoked by what is outside us, the starry heavens or a dozen
copper beeches.
____
Robert Wexelblatt is professor of humanities at Boston University’s College of General Studies. He has published essays, stories, and poems in a variety of journals, two story collections, Life in the Temperate Zone and The Decline of Our Neighborhood, a book of essays, Professors at Play, two short novels, Losses and The Derangement of Jules Torquemal. His novel, Zublinka Among Women, won the Indie Book Awards First Prize for Fiction. A new collection of stories, The Artist Wears Rough Clothing, is forthcoming.
