On wonder...

This one is dedicated to Neil Gaiman*. A man who's writing can ignite the fires of wonder and awe in even the coldest, dampest and most dead of human minds.

Wonder, in the sense of it being a state of the mind, is an interesting, interesting thing. Lets try to define it shall we? How about 'A state of the mind, sometimes overtly felt, sometimes sublimely that is one part awe, another amazement, a third excitement and so on and so forth.' If you haven't seen where I am getting at by now (I am truly sorry) I shall spell it out:

Wonder is one of those things we 'just know'. We can't define it because it is one of those things that we use to define other things. A sort of geometrical point for states of the mind. But this is all besides the point. You know what wonder is because you just do. And if you don't, well, you have my deepest sympathies.

Now, I'd like to get back to Gaiman. Gaiman was [and is :) ] the author of 'the sandman' a comic series published under DC's Vertigo trademark. It's about dream. Dream being not simply a state of the mind, but an actual, thinking, being who embodies all the things that constitute dream. A sort of anthropomorphic personification of possibility. He is the shaper of things, the sandman, the prince of stories, he is dream. His siblings are, in order of age, Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair and Delirium and they are the endless- they are an expression of the poles upon which our minds define everything.

Gaiman's brilliance was in his characterization. And that is brilliance I can scarcely do justice to in an essay of any length - I honestly beg you, take the time and read his works**. They are, in my opinion, the greatest work of fiction ever given form and substance. And how fitting that the character that series revolves around is fiction itself. It was simply the stuff wonder is made of.

And that brings us back to wonder: What is 'wonder'? Wonder is a state of the mind beyond simple definition. It is the driving force behind dream, it is that pole about which our desire to do and make and create and understand is built!

And that force is what drives me. That is my pathetic excuse for living***. I wonder. I wonder about the stars and I dream of the day they will be ours. I dream of the day we will stand on our Earth, look up and be able to say: "Look! There is Orion, there is Andromeda. We have been there. I can go there if I so will.They are ours. They are mine; for we have reached out and taken them."

I wonder. And I desire. I desire be one of the multitudes who has done his share in bringing us to that dream of mine. I want to be one of the millions of shoulders, some great, some small but all significant, upon whom that future rests.

Harshad.

*Neil Gaiman

** The sandman

*** Read my previous post- To live or not to live - that isn't really a question.

To live or not to live - that isn't really a question.

"What is it that drives YOU?"

"Why do you bother taking that next step?"

"Why don't you just sit down, loose the will to live and die?"

These are questions that hold meaning beyond the ordinary realm of the mundane* (I shall come back to the whole concept of mundane a little later) life and it would do you some good if you took the time to sit down and actually think about them.

Now, the most common answer is that you just don't want to cease, that you do things because you 'must' and because, well, because. But really, these answers are really just questions with regression built in: "Why 'must' you?"

I mean, consider this for a moment: The milky way contains a hundred billion stars and at least as many planets. The known universe contains a hundred billion galaxies. Thats 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. You are a lump of biological matter, weighing between 40 (eat some food damnit!) and 200 kilograms (Though, I admit, if you are near the end of that scale you do gain cosmic significance) on the third planet from a completely normal, ordinary, sun. Nothing you do or don't do will make any difference to the universe at large. And really, whats the point of making a difference in the first place?

The reason for this 'must', this (on the surface) unreasonable, illogical and rather silly desire is simple enough: We 'must' because we 'must'. Hold on, that isn't as idiotic as it sounds. The complete(-ish) argument goes like this: If we didn't want to live and do things (heh!) we wouldn't try as hard. People who didn't try as hard wouldn't, for example, run quite as fast when being chased by a pack of Smilodon***. And thus, they were much less likely to survive. The people who did survive would have been the one who wanted to live more and so would their children. Take that mechanism and give it three billion years and presto: we have us.

What does that mean? Simply: WE really really want to live and, as a derivative of that mechanism, do things that sound 'meaningful'. And are like that because it is a mostly universal feature of life**. Do note that meaningful is highly subjective - look at Marlyn Manson as an example..........

So, that brings us back to the first question: "Why do you live?". Which , as we have seen (or I have, at any rate...) is really:

"What feeble delusion of grandeur do you use to justify your desire to live and do whatever it is you do?"

*A note: Mundane supposedly comes from the latin 'Mundus', which means 'of the world'. It is a sad, sad thing that a word for the world (as a metaphor for reality) has come to mean 'boring'.

**Err, another note: 'to live' is really speaking, in biological terms: 'to let my genes survive'. What that means is that an idiot who kills himself for love (like several species of spider, except that spiders are interesting) does nothing that goes against my lil pet theory. :)

***And another: Smilodon was a pack hunting, lion sized, prehistoric cat.