Wonderment

A proper sense of wonder seems to me to be an achieved thing--childhood is more a time of ignorance than wonder. We think of a child as open to the miraculous, but it is more the case that children take the miraculous as a matter of course, because they don't know any better. I liked a lot of things as a child and as a teenager, but they didn't amaze me the way they do now, at least not to the same extent. The enormity of a Jerry Garcia solo, a great poem or novel, even something as cliched (as an example in this context, not in itself) as a sunset or the moon is much more astounding or amazing to me as I get older. In the case of cultural artifacts, I suppose part of it is that the older one gets, the more the experience of a life of failure weighs against examples of resounding success, the more things one has tried and the longer one has worked at things so the difficulty of things becomes more intelligible to one, and the portion of one's life that one can defer to some time of future achievement becomes smaller in comparison to the actual record of a completed life of frustration and incompetence. But that is not all, or people who have been wildly successful most of their lives would not have an increased capacity for wonder as they get older, and I think they do. I think whatever reason this is probably bridges the gap from wonderment at Jerry to wonderment at sunsets and moons, but I don't know what the reason actually is. Maybe it's that as we learn and comprehend and taxonomize the world, some portions of it stand out more to the extent that it has become more articulated for us. Maybe, I'm not sure, but I think that's part of it, anyway.