“The world will never starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder.”
— G.K. Chesterton
In 1845, Henry David Thoreau stepped outside of Concord, Massachusetts, and moved to the woods on its outskirts. He moved in grief and in protest. His brother had died suddenly, tragically, of lockjaw on January 11, 1842. Thoreau was plagued months afterward with psychosomatic symptoms of lockjaw. The sudden loss of his brother, literary critics agree, may have helped inspire Thoreau’s move to Walden Pond. But it also appears that Thoreau was frustrated by life in Concord. He loved his community, but felt its hypocrisy on the eve of the Civil War (as his essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” would make clear). In a speech on “Sound and Silence” that he wrote for the Concord Lyceum in December 1838, Thoreau had referenced the “dry discourses” and “foolish acts” that plague society. In Walden, therefore, he writes:
“Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake…”
Walden, in many ways, becomes a call to listen rightly. It suggests a means and a method to touch reality, to reach beyond the busyness that plagues our lives. In this way, the book also offers a poignant and fascinating call to wonder.
In an essay for Comment Magazine, the brilliant Michael Sacasas considers our loss of wonder, and why it matters. He suggests that experiencing wonder is integral to the state of being human—and that our capacity for wonder is under attack, slowly subsiding into numbness, in the modern era.
Wonder, Sacasas explains, “is experienced as an interruption of our ordinary expectations or usual way of seeing the world. Wonder arises when the commonplace becomes suddenly perplexing or the ordinary takes on an extraordinary quality.”
Yet as philosopher Howard Parsons writes (in a quote Sacasas shares in his essay), “what makes ordinary experience ‘ordinary’ is the flattening out of the wild, erratic flora and protruding peaks and outcroppings—by blueprints, bulldozers, superhighways.” An instrumentalized attitude toward the world “[extinguishes] from awareness the qualitative uniqueness of things and hence the experience of wonder.” In the amalgam of excess and busyness that plagues (yet also, often, privileges) our lives, we lose sight of the finite, the individual, and the precious.
I recently sat down and spent 45 minutes listening to Bach. Not doing anything else. Just listening. It had been ages since I had simply sat and listened to beautiful music. As a result, I had missed out on the wonders such a practice offers: the shiver that goes down my spine as I listen quietly to Bach’s organ music, the peace that settles on my soul as I take in his Unaccompanied Cello Suite.
Sacasas’s piece focuses on sight. He uses the first images captured by the James Webb space telescope—talked about briefly on the internet, and then woefully forgotten—as an instance of this numbness to the wonder of reality. Distracting forms of technological entertainment and outrage constantly push us toward new content on our smartphones. Our lives are saturated with images and text, resulting in a feeling of overwhelmed paralysis. It makes sense that we’ve unlearned how to truly see things—and therefore, how to experience wonder.
But I think a consideration of sound as a medium of wonder and delight is also important to mention here. Thoreau took sound very seriously. His journals, as well as Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, are full of references to sound and its importance to any real attunement to the world as it is. In the late 1830s, Henry David Thoreau began to formulate a poetics in his Journal that prioritized the transcription of nature’s voice, the silence of the poet, and the resonance that ought to exist between poet and world. This resonance could only be achieved, he reasoned, through a fastidious empirical focus on fact that, he reasoned, would reveal the fantastic nature of reality, and emphasize relationality over individualism. Thoreau spent the following decades of his life (up until his death in 1862) seeking to implement this literary vision, calling his readers and himself to perceive (and perform) our relationship to the world anew.
To fully listen, however, requires silence. It requires receptivity and stillness. But if Thoreau is correct, this sort of concerted attention helps us to transcend the constrictions and distractions of our own time—and therefore to say, “This is, and no mistake.”
This November, I hope you might consider joining me and other Granola subscribers in discussing Thoreau’s Walden together. We’ll read a few chapters of Walden each week, and I’ll write weekly posts with some thoughts on our chapters, their context and history, and what we might learn from them. At the end of the month, we’ll join some fantastic speakers to discuss Thoreau and his thought.
Thoreau has interesting things to teach us in our particular moment. How do we recover wonder, and live more fully into our calling as humans? I think it will be a wonderful month, and I hope you’ll join us.
To join, you can get a paid subscription 75% off by clicking the link below. The first book club post will be out on Friday!
news + essays
Appreciated this essay by Charlie Clark on good work.
Jared Farmer moans the loss of ancient trees—and calls readers to preservation: “This is a great diminution: fewer megaflora (massive trees), fewer elderflora (ancient trees), fewer old-growth forests, fewer ancient species, fewer species overall.”
In a similar vein, Margaret Renkl calls us to plant acorns.
A lovely post from Addison Del Mastro on kitchen contentment and liturgies.
books
Kristin Lavransdatter, by Sigrid Unset
Numerous individuals I deeply admire and respect have talked about the beauties of this novel. Now I am slowly discovering them, as well. Have you read Kristin Lavransdatter? Would love to hear your thoughts, if so.Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow
Another long-praised book I’ve always meant to read. About 1/3 of the way through, and thoroughly enjoying it.
food + drink
A perfect autumn meal: this chicken and wild rice casserole (I substituted the apples + spinach for roasted butternut squash + kale) and focaccia bread, with brown butter pumpkin snickerdoodles and spiced hot cider for dessert.
Quickly devoured this shepherd’s pie with roasted garlic cheesy mash.
Recipes to try: shaved Brussels sprout with parmesan, a mushroom galette with time and chèvre, and this gorgeous cranberry curd tart.
listening
I think we listen to David Bowie’s narration of Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” at least once a week? My kids love it.
Fauré’s Pavane, Satie’s 3 Gymnopédies, and Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 2 in C Minor.
I read (listened to) Kristen recently, as well! I had seen people like Haley Stewart & Jessica Hooten Wilson —among others—sing its praises. And I was pleasantly surprised at how readable and enveloping the story was!
I love Kristin Lavransdatter! (If I can ever spell the last name right 😬) We had to choose a book to read independently in my senior seminar English class and my professor suggested that one for me--and she was right! The development over the course of her life, the complex family relationships, and the mystical mixing of Nordic religions and medieval Christianity all captivated me. Hope you continue to enjoy!