Nineteen years ago I wrote a post here with the title 'The sense of wonder'. I am a much older man now, and would have been bored to tears with life if something of that sense didn't still linger deep inside me.
One of the greatest wonders, of course, is the fact that I have lived all those years since that last post, and so much has happened, and the days dragged while the years whizzed by, until now I sometimes feel like laughing and crying at the same time to think that I am quickly becoming an old man, and 85%+ of the living human population, or so says Google, is younger than I am!
Some forms of wonder never seem to pall. I first watched my work being transformed into money with which I could buy things when I was in mid-teenage, and I have been working continuously for more than four decades now, and bought so many things with the money I have made, and yet it still makes me wonder like a child to watch people paying me so that I can pay others for their wares and services - imagine, me, pushing 63, and having a formal training in economics! So also the way the young keep being born and growing up into self-sufficient, self-important adults (or so they think) before my eyes, and I keep watching and cannot always remember that I am growing ever older along with them, with 'Time, which makes memories of everything'...
কাল ছিল ডাল খালি / আজ ফুলে যায় ভরে,
বল দেখি তুই মালি /হয় সে কেমন করে?
There are more bitter kinds of wonder too, like the all too common human folly of putting off the most important things for a later time (like telling your loved ones how much you care for them and miss them) until it is just too late, and the kind of stupidity that persuades people that they can somehow try the bad things that their forerunners did and the results will, this time round, turn out to be good. When shall we learn, for instance, that nothing truly good comes from going to war, for either side, that could not be negotiated in peace, over time, with much less horror and devastation?
And now there's a different kind of wonder. In his Ode to a Nightingale, Keats concludes with the line 'fled is that music/do I wake or sleep'? Having thought and read so much along those lines for much longer than most of my students have yet lived, I begin to wonder: what does 'real' mean? Was this life real by any universally acceptable definition, or was it a long, vast, bewildering dream which is soon to end? And will that truly be the end, or just a final waking up? I shall refer the interested reader to the chapter titled On Dreams and Daydreams in the only book I have ever written, To My Daughter.
One last item for now: I cannot stop wondering how the computer/smartphone/internet era has made the general run of humankind so ahistorical minded. From infant to 40-year old, they all seem to believe that the world was created maybe just about half a century ago, the way they talk, the way they are surprised to hear that we have been living with lots of things, from epidemics to spectacles, for hundreds, or even thousands of years. And also how very different things people mean when they say 'it happened a long time ago'. The ordinary man means maybe twenty years, a historian means thousands, a biologist or geologist means millions or tens of millions, and an astronomer glibly talks of supernovae exploding billions of years ago, as if that makes perfect sense to him, as if he really grasps what that kind of timespan means...
So here's as much time as makes sense to me, a very ordinary man:
Jenny kiss'd me when we met
Jumping from the chair she sat in,
Time, you thief, who loves to get sweets into your list,
Put that in.
Say that I am weary, say I am sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss'd me,
Say that I am growing old, but add -
Jenny kiss'd me.
