So, the question is: how?
*
Certainly not by reverting to your inner child. To claim we can only find a sense of wonder by finding the child within is to follow the logic of believing that we are bound to lose wonder as we grow up. If that were really the case, then of course we would have to go back to our childhood as the only enchanted place we had ever known. But there must be a better option than returning to a state in which we were barely potty-trained.
Social convention holds children to be sweet, reasonably clean and adorably mischievous, but if you have ever seen a real child, or you have the faintest memory of what being one was really like, you know the truth. Children are brutes. They are self-centred, demanding and unscrupulous, or, as J. M. Barrie put it at the end of Peter Pan, ‘heartless’. But let’s cut them some slack: they have to be like that in order to survive, vulnerable and dependent as they are. They are fumbling around in a bewildering new world where everything and everyone is bigger and stronger than they are. Their sense of wonder grows in dark, shadowy places.
As a child, I felt in awe of my big brothers. They were role models to me; more than that, inspirations. I didn’t make my choices, I made the choices I thought they would make. They loved me truly, but our power dynamic was imbalanced. I was utterly helpless in the face of their whims. If they decided to hang out with their girlfriends on a Sunday afternoon rather than stay at home and watch cartoons with me, my world would crumble, and I would be desperate, lonely and forlorn. Children must go with the tide, like the servants of feudal masters. Part of the reason they feel magic so intensely is that they hope magic will give them a level of power they do not, in fact, possess.
Anthropologists say that magic is (among other things) a strategy used by the dispossessed to make their existence bearable. Take, for example, the peasants of southern Italy, the hardened line of labourers of the region I come from. They were poor, they were at the bottom of a feudal hierarchy and they toiled in a harsh land. They had no money, no power, no hope of improving their situation. Magic was all they had. The same goes for children.
A child’s enchantment comes with the steep price of helplessness. As grown-ups we are not helpless, not in the way children are, and we should be happy about that. Receiving magical gifts was great, but now you can have more or less what you want (within certain limits, of course), more or less when you want it. You don’t like broccoli? Fine, you don’t have to eat it. Children might feel magic, but adults can work it. They get to be Father Christmas.
You see the paradox here. You get to be Father Christmas only when you realize that Father Christmas is not real, and by then, you don’t have a reason to bother being Father Christmas any more. You would rather be rich, for example. Magic is an escape at best, a delusion at worst: you know that real power lies elsewhere. You dress up like Father Christmas, but only a seriously maladjusted adult would believe they are, indeed, Father Christmas. The cliché of childlike wonder is worse than useless, it is detrimental, since it denies the facts of life. You are a grown-up; you have bills to pay and you will have to go on paying for ever; you know that your imaginary friend is imaginary, because one of your real friends got cancer last year and you can damn well tell the difference.
We can’t bring back enchantment just by telling ourselves that we really, really should do so. All we can achieve that way is to create a manic simulacrum of a state we have lost, and to which we can never return. The magic of childhood is a lost domain, to which the paths are barred.
We have come to a dead end. Enchanted or powerless. A dreamer or a doer. A wild fantasist or a cog in the machine. Which one are you?
You are someone who will find a way out.
*
I closed the Theaetetus filled with a tremendous sense of purpose. I was determined to start out on a journey to the heart of wonder. To storm the castle and take back what is ours!
I started by travelling all the way to the kitchen, where I filled a Moka pot with coffee and put it on the stove. How can you inhabit a world of enchantment when you know that Father Christmas was your dad, that the Mediterranean is a glorified pond, and that crime sometimes does pay?
By talking to those who do it every day.
The expression ‘sense of wonder’ comes from literary criticism: it was first used by science-fiction enthusiasts. One of the main triggers of my lifelong love affair with wonder was reading The Lord of the Rings when I was ten. The beauty of its enchanted woods and the mystery of its ancient ruins remained with me.
The first thing Homo sapiens did, as soon as it was smart enough to do something other than sleep, hunt and copulate, was tell stories. Stories are the way our cultures came to define themselves. They are the cornerstone of philosophy, religion, art and science. If wonder is raw energy, stories are the first shape that energy took – and storytellers were always in the business of shaping wonder.
But stories were not only made of words. Take the Lascaux cave, the prehistoric site in southern France whose walls are decorated with around 6,000 depictions of animals (bulls, horses, stags, big cats and the odd human), drawn some 20,000 years ago. The images are clearly telling us something, and anthropologists and art historians have been theorizing about what that might be ever since the cave was discovered in 1940. Lascaux had no practical function to speak of, and, when you consider how small and vulnerable were the tribes of the Late Stone Age, you could be forgiven for thinking that they had more pressing tasks than walking underground, in the dark, for hours on end, etching figures on a cave wall. And yet that is exactly what they did. But why? Those who took the trouble to create these beautiful paintings must have been driven by motivations more mysterious than the functional depiction of animals slaughtered in the hunt. There is magic at work here. These cave artists were past masters of wonder.
Such people are still among us. Even in our disenchanted age there are people who do things with wonder, as a profession, a calling, or both. Artists, scientists and magicians, to name but three. They could give me important lessons.
Not lessons, I thought. Training.
All of our senses can be trained: we can become better at spotting things, we can develop a musical ear, we can learn to improve our sense of touch, taste and smell.
And we can train our emotions also. We can train ourselves to be calmer, to cope better with heartbreak, to carry on when the going gets tough.
I didn’t see why our sense of wonder should be any different. I could search for wisdom in various different fields, and come up with a training programme, a workout to strengthen our wonder muscles.