Arguably the ‘responsibility to awe’ falls heaviest on the shoulders of artists and musicians, novelists and poets, filmmakers and designers. How do you keep the flame of childlike awe from being drowned out by the cold glare of seriousness?įrom Plato to Elson, Descartes to Einstein, the challenge that wonder perennially poses is one of equilibrium: how do you keep the flame of childlike awe from being drowned out by the cold glare of seriousness? Nor is it just a conundrum for thinkers. Sometimes, however, Elson confesses, she loses sight of that duty to remain faithful to the soul-enriching power of wonder: “Starlight seems too sharp… I forget to ask questions/And only count things”. “We astronomers,” she says at the outset of a poem by that same title, “are nomads… we breed enthusiasms,/Honour our responsibility to awe”.
Just 39, in 1999, wonder wasn’t an impediment to knowledge but an intellectual obligation she took seriously. For him, wonder is like a set of training wheels for deep understanding it may get you moving in the right direction, but you don’t want your friends to see you relying on it.įor the Canadian-American poet-scientist Rebecca Elson, who died, aged “Although it is good to be born with some kind of inclination to this passion”, he wrote in his final philosophical treatise The Passions of the Soul in 1649, “because it disposes us to the acquisition of sciences, yet we ought afterwards to endeavour as much as we can to be rid of it”. While Plato famously insisted “philosophy begins in wonder” and saw the emotion as fundamental to thought, the French philosopher René Descartes believed astonishment and awe were obstacles to clear cogitation. Since antiquity, philosophers have been equally divided about the primacy of wonder as a prerequisite for profound thinking. Wonder, in a sense, was a pendulating force that impelled and repelled him. And yet, Einstein also believed that “the process of scientific discovery” – the very pursuit to which he dedicated his life – “is, in effect, a continual flight from wonder”. Anyone, according to Albert Einstein, “who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead his eyes are closed”.
Wonder likewise likely played at least a small role in your pausing here on a platform devoted entirely to the wondrous wanderings of writers, musicians, filmmakers, designers, and artists. It’s wonder that illuminates the minds of Caspar David Friedrich’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1825-30) and ignites with lucent magic the mist of our imagination when it bends to the rainbow in John Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831). It’s the fire that burns behind every scientific discovery and every searching work of art. Kelly Grovier explores a history of wonder in art.
A candlelight painting recently rescued from obscurity shows two children absorbed in play.
0 kommentar(er)
