NO WONDER!
by W.E.Sangster
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HAVE YOU ever analyzed the charm of childhood? Half the secret is that children can still wonder. Do you want to remain young?
Learn to keep wonder in your life. Life without wonder is hardly
worth living.
All philosophy, said Socrates, began in wonder. Why was man
not content to eat and drink and breed like other animals? Because he wondered, because something inside him tortured him with the desire to know.
In his early and dim awareness of God, primitive man was
conscious of Someone high and eerie, and this consciousness both
daunted and fascinated him. It said to him, "Come hither" and
"Stand back." Both--and both together. No honest thinker went in search of God who knew beforehand whether it is more terrible to see the One before Whom the angels veil their faces or to learn that man is all alone in this mysterious universe.
So it is with scientific research. Curiosity is still its
great dynamic. Said Einstein: "The most beautiful thing we can
experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true
science."
There are people all over the world eating their hearts out to
travel and see wonders which are far away, yet most of them are
blind to wonders near at hand. In familiar events of the familiar world about me, which I dismiss as utterly trifling, Shakespeare would find the material for a play.
How can one keep wonder in life? Is there any mental strategy
for seeing all things with mystery and the morning dew upon them?
Holidays are one way. But not chiefly to go places;rather, "to come back with film-free eyes."
G.K. Chesterton used to live in Battersea, a section of London. One day as he was packing for a holiday a friend asked where he was going.
"To Battersea," he replied.
"The wit of your remark escapes me," said the friend.
"I am going to Battersea," said Chesterton, "via Paris,
Heidelberg, Frankfort. I am going to wander all over the world
until once more I find Battersea. I cannot see any Battersea here, "because a cloud of sleep and custom has come across my eyes." The only way to go to Battersea is to go away from it."
No one will miss the deep wisdom behind that show of nonsense.
The ideal end of a vacation is to come home not with a grudge in
the heart because it is over but with the eager thrill of being
back. Does home look fresh again? Even a little strange?
But then, of course, one need not go on a holiday to work the
miracle. Robert Haven Schauffler tells of a shop assistant in
Zurich whose hobby was painting and who lived in resentment because of all the ugliness he had to pass on his way to work. One day illumination came. A taste for art, he reasoned, was not given him in order to resent ugliness but to see beauty where others were blind to it. He resolved to find ten pictures he could paint every time he walked that familiar course. It became fun finding them.
A lissome youth helping his mother from a red bus. A ragged boy
aping a pompous policeman. A burst of sunlight making a halo
around the head of a frizzy blonde. Pictures everywhere.
Most snapshooters fail not in estimating distances, apertures
and exposures but in taking what is not a picture. With the seeing eye comes wonder and, with more wonder, a keener eye.
To keep wonder in my life I constantly go back in thought to
the moment when I first heard a quite wonderful thing. One day
long ago I called on a friend and learned that his young son had
made a "wireless set." Would I like to listen? I would, never
having heard a radio. But what would I make of those dots and
dashes? I smiled benignly on the youngster while he awkwardly
placed the earphones on my head and began to fidget with what he
called the crystal.
Then it came--a burst of music! I stared at the boy in
incredulity. And I have recalled that incredulity a thousand times since. When I pause now before turning the knob and think myself back to the pre-radio days, the breath-taking astonishment of broadcasting breaks over me anew.
Here is another device I use to preserve my sense of
astonishment. I have five senses unimpaired. Whenever I think of being deprived of one of them, I awake freshly to the wonder of having it. Deafness? I put all my mind in my ear and wonder at the marvel of sound: the hum of the bee, the purr of a great
engine, the subdued murmur of household chatter. Blindness? I
shut my eyes awhile and then open them to the sun and the shadows, the rolling countryside, the smile at the corner of my wife's mouth.
Finishing a meal, a man once said to me: "I've practically no
sense of taste, you know." Ever since, I've been tasting better. I deliberately savour flavours. Smell and touch I am developing, too, and storing in my memory. I can smell at will the lavender farms I visited a year ago. I can touch again the stubby doormat head of that little boy we took into our home for a holiday. Most of the things I foolishly spend my time wanting are not worth one of the treasures I already possess.
Nor do my discoveries end there. I have found that to look at
things as work is always to look at them through dark glasses. I
am no longer surprised at the old rancher who looked down into
Bryce Canyon, Utah, and said that it was "a hell of a place to lose a cow in." He saw that great work of nature only through the spectacles of drudgery, and those spectacles shut out the light of wonder.
Years ago I visited Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight.
In its small museum were several suits of armour. Looking at them, I was enthraled;my mind threaded the long avenues of the past. But my reverie was interrupted. A charwoman on holiday came in, took one glance at the armour and said to her friend:"Cor blimey, I wouldn't like to have to clean that every week!"
Foster your capacity for wonder. Stand and stare at the sea,
for instance. It is one of the great refuges of the mysterious on this earth. It is six miles deep in places and who can doubt that it hides creatures never seen by the eye of man? The sea serpent, of course. And what else?
Foster wonder--of the world, of yourself, of humanity, of the
Deity. Chesterton said:"The world will never starve for
wonders--only for the want of wonder."
One of the unanswered questions of life is:"When is old age?"
My answer would be:"When we have ceased to wonder."
Harold Nicolson says that his grandmother lived in a state of
"incandescent amazement." She not only remembered the first steam packet but lived to hear of M. Bleriot flying the Channel. The amazement with which this remarkable old lady exulted in the
surprises of our astonishing world kept her young. If the young
people around her became blase, she would rap her ebony stick and
demand that they greet the surprises of this Jules Verne world with something of the excitement which she felt herself. She lived to be 99.
Those who wonder are always exultantly asking, "What next?" They have a childlike eagerness. Nor will they be disappointed at death. To them, death itself may seem the most exciting adventure of all.(#)
