Reflection 429

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My Subject is Wonder

My subject is wonder, and my starting point so obvious it often escapes us. It is me, sitting at a table looking out on the world. It is the fact that I exist, that there is anything at all. It is the givenness that astonishes: the fact that the mountains, the larch tree, the gentian, the jay, exist, and that someone called me is here to observe them. It is what the Cambridge philosopher Wittgenstein called 'existential wonder', and there is nowhere else to begin. Not with theories of the Big Bang, nor with what subatomic physics tells us of the nature of matter, but with the most disarming fact of all: the world is and it might not have been. It is: I am. That is the first wonder: what do we make of it?  Michael Mayne, "This Sunrise Of Wonder"