The Sense of Wonder

"Yes, it started as an essay and she was going to turn it into a book but died of cancer before she could. I had a hard time choosing merely five books on this topic, and I would have liked to talk, among the American writers, about many others including, of course, Henry David Thoreau but also Loren Eiseley, Lewis Thomas, Annie Dillard. In the end I chose Rachel Carson for several reasons. She was a very good scientist and a good writer. Also, she continues to be traduced by the anti-environmentalists. They claim she was a Luddite and responsible for the deaths of millions of people because she opposed the use of DDT. This is a grotesque lie. So I think it’s important to celebrate her work. She’s best known for Silent Spring , which is about the poisoning of terrestrial ecosystems and, of course, the extirpation of birdlife, but she was actually a marine biologist and before that, she wrote two marvellous book called The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea. “One of the things that science—wisely applied—can do, is blow that open to the radical openness that I was talking about, the sense of wonder. It makes us a little bit more humble and I think that’s what wonder’s about.” The Sense of Wonder is a short piece, barely more than an essay really, though it exists in book form, and it’s essentially just a celebration of being in the world. As far as I know, it’s not often read but a few familiar lines from it tend to get trotted out. ‘If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children,’ Carson writes, ‘I should ask that her gift to each child in the world should be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years, the alienation from the sources of our strength.’ It’s a fine sentiment. Some people find the way it is expressed a little cloying. I think I find it a bit cloying myself. But if you read the whole, it’s very fresh, it’s very immediate, and yes it is, it’s partly a love letter and some advice to her nephew. I’d like to quote another passage: ‘One stormy night when my nephew Roger was about twenty months old, I wrapped him in a blanket and carried him down to the beach in the rainy darkness. Out there, just at the edge of where-we-couldn’t-see, big waves were thundering in, dimly seen white shapes that boomed and shouted and threw great handfuls of froth at us. Together we laughed for pure joy, he a baby meeting for the first time the wild tumult of oceanus, I with the salt of half a lifetime of sealove in me. But I think we felt the same spine tingling response to the vast, roaring ocean and the wild night around it.’ So it starts with her baby nephew but ends touchingly with a letter she received from an 83-year old woman who she describes as still having that very intense sense of wonder about life. It’s a beautiful piece. And it’s important that it is written by somebody who was a very fine scientist, whose scientific work is still being denied in the context of a concerted strategy by vested interests to deny a lot of vital science with regard to environment and block action that is urgently required for the good of humanity and all life. We like to think so, but some people might say we have an over romantic idea of what children are about and it’s a little bit dangerous to generalise. I had a short but interesting conversation when I was writing A New Map of Wonders with the film maker Phil Agland, who has made a number of superb documentaries with the Pygmy people of the Congo and also in both remote and urban parts of China. One of the things he captures brilliantly in his recent series Between Clouds and Dreams is the revelatory wonder on the faces of children when they see film of an endangered little bird on the mudflats off the coast south of Shanghai. When I was talking to him, he told me that you see this in these kids but then, when they go to the equivalent of secondary school, they enter this super intense system where they are beginning the long hard preparation for the gaokao exams and they get this wonder just thumped out of them. So maybe we can generalise, that, broadly speaking, kids in industrialised cultures have this sense of wonder and it gets a little beaten out of us."