Yet on rereading his poem ‘Lamia’, I am left uneasy. On the one hand, I can relate to the sentiment. On the other, however, blaming science is a dangerous game. Science might have chased gnomes out of mines, but it also saved miners’ lives, and though it made charms fly, it also made us fly. Not to mention that Keats died in Rome at twenty-five, of tuberculosis, and with a little more science, he might have lived.
We know this; so we are tempted to believe that life is a matter of choosing between a short, dysfunctional life of enchantment, or a life that is long, successful and quite dull. It is once again the core choice our society sets up for us – are you a dreamer or a doer? A binary choice, apparently simple, as all the best traps are.
We started our journey because we refused to fall into it. Others made the rules for us and decided they are the only rules possible. We should not obey; we can make rules of our own. Magicians and witches set us on our path, and now scientists will show us the next move.
But first, let’s leave Descartes behind.
*
Descartes said: ‘it’s only dull and stupid folk who are not naturally disposed for wonder.’4 The ‘dull and stupid’ do not understand that trees are not supposed to walk, so if they happen to see one ambling around, they shrug it off and carry on. Nothing can astound them. We tend to believe that the unflappable ones are wise. But no, said Descartes – they are just dense.
The problem is that life, left to its own devices, makes us all dull and stupid. When you are little, you run outside excitedly when it snows, but then, when you are grown up, you grumble about the snow that makes your train run late. I know for a fact that you are dull and stupid. So am I. We are on this journey because we refuse to die that way.
This is where we must part company with Descartes. He noticed that wonder ‘seems to diminish with use’, because with the passing of time fewer things are new to us, and more and more things become déjà vu and déjà entendu. But he was convinced that first, this was inevitable, and second, this was a good thing. Wonder must come, leave useful memories, and then go.
Descartes expressed himself like a tough-talking boss who tells you that enjoying the magic is fine only as long as you stop early. Let your jaw go slack, kid, but then shut it and get to work. You live in a clockwork world and you’d better get on with it. For Descartes, the sole function of our sense of wonder is to spur us on to understand the world better and master it with a stronger grip. That’s it. Wonder on its own is worthless. Those who don’t have a sense for it are ‘dull and stupid’, true, but having too much of it is a ‘disease whose victims seek out rarities simply in order to wonder at them and not in order to know them’. Even worse, ‘things of no importance are as likely to grab their attention as things that would actually be useful to investigate’.
You hear the echo of his words in those of the teacher who kept telling you to stop looking out of the window and focus on what really matters. Do not become ‘too full of wonder’, he admonished, with Descartes. Don’t build castles in the air. It’s bad for you.
This might seem wise: too much of a good thing is a bad thing, they say. Is that true, though? Descartes took it for granted that everything comes in definable measures, like the amount of water you drink from a single cup, or the miles you cover in a day. He believed – superstitiously, for he had no reason to do so – in a purely mechanical universe, in which everything was a pump, a cog, a quantity either known or soon to be known. So, you should keep track of how much wonder you feel, until the moment you say, ‘I’m good, thanks’, as you would say to the guy buying the next round at the pub.
Everything is quantifiable, measurable, everything is a matter of economics. All life (and human relationships) can be reduced to a zero-sum game. It is a waste of time to just sit and contemplate a hare in springtime; you contemplate just enough, then you hunt the hare and slice it open, to understand how it works. There are things of consequence and things of no consequence, the useful and the useless, and sober Descartes knows which is which.
Well, let’s not be sober: let’s jump on the table and sing bawdy songs. Too much of a good thing, as I read once on a graffiti in Glastonbury, can be wonderful. Let’s kill the idea that our sense of wonder is a humble servant whose job is to prepare the place for the better things to come.
I am not implying that we shouldn’t study a hare’s biology. There is a lot of pleasure to be gained from that, a lot of wonder, and a lot of wisdom too. I am saying that life is not a zero-sum game, it is not a sum of binary choices, of yes or no, here or there. Unfortunately, we inherited Descartes’ view: wonder is a young people’s game, and in order to grow up we have to give it away. This is a widespread superstition in which we should stop believing.
Rather, we might let our sense of wonder breathe and speak and grow. It will change organically on its own, becoming at times the curiosity to understand a tree, at times the inspiration to write a poem. Rather than decide where to go from wonder, rather than fretting over being in control of it, let’s trust wonder and see where it leads us. You might discover that what you wanted to do all along was, indeed, to study a hare’s biology; or just to sit under the canopy of a beech tree. You thought you wanted to be an artist and instead you discovered you were keen to go to law school; you thought you wanted to get a PhD in mathematics but you found that life as a schoolteacher was more rewarding.
Descartes left us with the gloomy prophecy that we will lose our sense of wonder as we grow older. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy, which only comes true if we believe it to be so. Rather than the first move of your emotional life, you could think of wonder as its bass note, booming into prominence sometimes, then fading in the background only to rise again, always playing. It is not something that happens first but something that happens always. Listen to it and you will realize that ‘things of no importance’ do not exist in this bizarre universe of ours, only things you didn’t look at closely enough, because you were too ‘dull and stupid’ to realize how new they could be. Descartes too was dull and stupid in some respects. We will find our third key when we learn to look more carefully.
We began our journey by locating a first spark of wonder within us, with the help of magicians. When that spark lit a flickering candle, we danced with witches in the shadows it cast. Now we are going to set our world ablaze, and to do that, we are not going to hide from the light of reason any more. Rather, we are going to embrace it – to the utmost extent.
*
The world is not a second older than you. Are you seventy-four? Then your world is seventy-four years old. Depending on your knowledge of history, you have a vague or a slightly less vague idea of some of the stuff that happened before you were born, and a vaguer idea about what might happen after you die, and yet every idea you have had, every experience you have been through, every thought you have ever thought, the entire lifespan of the world from your point of view is contained within those seventy-four years. Do you seriously believe that you can run out of new experiences in seventy-four years?
Think about this: 66 million years ago, dinosaurs became extinct. Before that, they walked the Earth for around 177 million years. This is such an enormous span of time that it is almost impossible for us to conceive it. To get a better idea, just think of this – our entire species, Homo sapiens, has been kicking around for a mere 200,000 years or thereabouts, and we are already self-destructing: I wouldn’t bet on our making it to our one-millionth birthday. Dinosaurs were on this planet far – immeasurably far – longer than us. No scholar believes that dinosaurs ever managed to create the advanced technology it takes to self-destruct. Maybe they were too stupid, or maybe they were too smart.