The Way to Wonder

Consider the most moving moments of your life. Chances are they involved a sense of wonder: falling in love, witnessing the birth of your child, looking up at Niagara or down at the Grand Canyon.

Employers are calling for college graduates with so-called “soft skills,” but are students hearing the call?

Expressing doubt about her choice of major, a student once compared herself to a friend who was attending another institution, where she was developing a set of easily recognizable job skills. Compared to this friend, our student felt inadequate.  What, she asked, would she be able to show for the four years she was putting into college?

Showing what they do for students has long been the problem for those of us who teach the arts, including painting and my own field of literature.  We sometimes point to communication and collaboration as valuable lessons taught through the arts, but students can develop these skills when studying other disciplines. Is there really something distinctive about immersing oneself in the arts?

I believe there is, but that something is not a skill, but a perspective, one that empowers us by reducing us.  Let’s call it wonder, a word that, in various forms, has pervaded literature in English literally since there has been literature in English, from Caedmon’s Hymn to Beowulf to Paradise Lost and beyond.

In daily conversation, we often use wonder as a verb meaning something like “question” (as in “I wonder why she left”), but the noun carries the more evocative, mystical meaning of “something transcending human understanding,” as well as the uncanny feeling that such a thing inspires when we experience it.

Shakespeare, who used wonder/wonderful/wondrous more than 200 times in his plays and poetry, captured its essence in a well-known line from Hamlet: “. . . there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  This sentiment of unknown wonders out there (or inside us or perhaps in no physical place) is paramount, and the wonder that they evoke is potent, awe-inspiring, breathtaking. 

Consider the most moving moments of your life.  Chances are they involved a sense of wonder: falling in love, witnessing the birth of your child, looking up at Niagara or down at the Grand Canyon.  These experiences washed over you like some invisible tide and perhaps even left you, to borrow a line from Poe, shuddering and “knowing not why.”

Photo by Drif Riadh on Unsplash

Now think of daily life, the one you live outside the Grand Canyon.  You probably have had many fleeting moments of wonder, and what evoked them?  A spreadsheet?  A policy?  A form?  All are important, and I wouldn’t want to live in a world without them (as long as someone else is in charge of creating them).  Business, politics, and other subjects can empower us.  They might even elicit a sense of fascination or inspiration, but never wonder.

Wonder stirs something mysterious inside us, stops our breath, carries us away.  When was the last time you felt this way?  If you were not in love or in nature, you were probably immersed in some artistic experience—listening to music, perhaps, or reading a poem.

I am an English professor who still remembers the wonder of reading one of Richard’s speeches (“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings . . .”) in Richard II for the first time three decades ago, so I live for this kind of thing, but we all experience wonder.  In some way, we all live for it. 

Wonder sustains us.  It often is associated with the spiritual; in Beowulf, it is God who works “wonder after wonder.”  Even if you are not religious, though, you probably feel better when you conceive of something beyond your ken, something unquestionably—yet mysteriously—powerful.  Think of Fox Mulder’s poster: “I WANT TO BELIEVE.”

Wonder inspires us.  If we thought we understood everything to be understood, why would we bother to imagine?  Imagination is valuable in its own right—for all the excitement and freedom it allows us to experience—but it also has practical value, as it is crucial for innovation, empathy, and even thought itself.  Can you imagine a world without imagination?  (You can—but only because you have imagination.)

Finally, wonder humbles us.  Without wonder, we fall victim to hubris: we think we know all we need to know, and we make dangerous decisions—to invent something without considering the possible unintended consequences, to rule (over a country, a company, or a person) without considering what we don’t know, even to inflict harm on individuals or whole races because we think we know best.

Artists have always appreciated the value of wonder.  Even when they have not used the word, they have evoked it with their words, tones, or images.  Just think of the otherworldly scenes of, say, one of Marc Chagall’s paintings or the climactic passages of any number of musical works.  Some philosophers of art have written of “the sublime,” which was essentially that which evokes a sense of wonder.  If we are fortunate—or unfortunate—we may have the special sensitivity of these artists, who live not only by wonder, but also with it, as a kind of ethereal, haunting companion.  For us artists, the wondrous is something felt, but not always seen.  It is a mystical something existing behind an “unfound door,” as in Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, or in a remembered dream, as in Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.” 

The hypersensitivity to the wondrous common among artists may have a psychological basis.  In my work as a scholar of literature, I have argued that Poe had an extraordinarily active and potent right brain, which scientists have linked to dreams, emotions, and more.  A separate entity connected to the left brain only through a band of nerve fibers, the right brain in the typical human lacks the capacity of verbal language and literally thinks differently.  Access to this psychological entity might make it easier for artists to experience wonder, since this realm is a kind of “Dream-Land” that is “Out of SPACE—out of TIME” (to use Poe’s phrases), a mysterious domain remote from language and perhaps even from consciousness.

Photo by Trifonov Evgeniy - Getty Images

Whatever the cause, this hypersensitivity often comes with a cost.  Poe had his demons, as did Van Gogh, Schumann, Plath, and any number of other artists.  Many may have been bipolar, as psychiatry professor Kay Redfield Jamison has argued, or perhaps the mere sensation of something ineffable (coupled with the frustration of never fully translating it) was sufficient to disturb them.

We need not be artists ourselves (with the concomitant costs) to experience wonder and the sustenance, imagination, and humility that come with it.  Like explorers on the leading edge of discovery, the artists of the species do the hard, dangerous work.  All we need do is accept the wondrous prizes of their exploration.

Students, study art in all its forms and feel confident about your decision. 

Colleges, keep teaching art.  Help students and employers appreciate the wonder that comes through it. 

Employers, keep hiring artists and artistic thinkers for their imagination and humility.

We may never discover if Hamlet was right, but simply believing that there are more things than we know is its own reward.

This world needs more wonder.  Art is the way.