The large bay window facing the garden in front of our house is better than television. No commercials, no dependency on internet whims, no bills to pay. That’s where I do most of my reading (best lighting in the house). From the couch I watch the show in the garden. Butterflies, moths and skippers. The occasional Northern mockingbird or cardinal. Squirrels, hummingbirds and this year a bumper crop of lizards – green and brown anoles. Not to mention the occasional human neighbor. Ten-thousand little comedies and dramas.
One of the
qualities I most admire in Theodore Dalrymple’s writing is the pleasure he takes
in observing commonplace things. That’s a virtue I associate with curiosity and
evenness of temper, a mature sensibility, one immune to more fashionable
distractions. His latest essay is “On the Preservation of Wonderment,” and as
usual he covers a lot of ground in a small space, beginning with Byron Rogers’
biography of the Welsh poet-priest R.S. Thomas, The Man Who Went Into the West (Aurum, 2006). I bought the book
eighteen years ago after reading Dalrymple’s review in City Journal. The biography is an often amusing account of a
difficult, notably humorless man who happened to be a brilliant poet. In a 1962
letter to Robert Conquest, Philip Larkin referred to him as “our friend
Arsewipe Thomas.” Dalrymple writes in the new essay:
“He was both
an impossible and a perfect subject for a biography: impossible because he was
so secretive and prickly, and perfect for the very same reason. Thomas was
about as approachable as a porcupine, but Rogers, who met him several times,
manages to pluck out, if not the heart, at least the pericardium of his
mystery.”
Thomas detested the modern world and preached a harsh
asceticism (no central heating – in Wales). “Thomas was more interested in
birds than in his fellow-humans,” Dalrymple writes. “They were for him a
consolation for the ugliness of life, especially in its modern, suburbanised
form.” After many digressions (all interesting) along the way, Dalrymple gets to the subject of wonder and quotes lines from “Swifts,” a poem in
Thomas’ 1966 collection Pietà :
“The swifts
winnow the air.
It is
pleasant at the end of the day
To watch
them. I have shut the mind
On fools.
The ‘phone’s frenzy
Is over.
There is only the swifts’
Restlessness
in the sky
And their
shrill squealing.
Sometimes
they glide,
Or rip the
silk of the wind
In passing.
Unseen ribbons
Are trailing
upon the air.
There is no
solving the problem
They pose,
that had millions of years
Behind it,
when the first thinker
Looked at
them.
Sometimes
they meet
In the high
air: what is engendered
At contact?
I am learning to bring
Only my
wonder to the contemplation
Of the geometry
of their dark wings.”
“To study [swifts and other birds] scientifically,
according to Thomas, would be to dilute or soil our wonderment, to make what is
marvellous prosaic. . . . As on many questions, I face both ways. I know what
they mean: we need to maintain our wonderment at Creation, and it is terrible
if we lose it or never have it in the first place (a condition that social
media promotes).”
All true. Dalrymple is close to identifying a primal division among people. My thoughts? Science complements wonder. The more I learn about the family Dactyloidae (anoles, and check out that etymology) the more wondrous they seem.
Dalrymple concludes:
“On the other
hand, to know more about the nature of reality can merely push the wonderment
one question further back. A child at a certain stage of development asks an
adult Why? and, on receiving an answer, asks again Why? How many questions does
it take to reach the stage of unanswerability, and therefore of wonderment? No
doubt Thomas would say, then, why bother to find out why? Why not just stop at
the wonderment evoked by mere observation?
“I am glad that there are poets who ask this question, as I am glad that there are people who did not stop to ask it.”
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