​Why Wonder?

In a few weeks, the class of 2020 will be entering Harvard, walking through the gates to the greenery and humid air of the almost-autumn. They’ll learn to code, to write, to create more freely and express thoughts more effectively. They’ll snap pictures of red brick buildings or river sunsets or squirrels. They’ll kiss people from cities they’d never heard of; they’ll discuss ideas they’d never dreamed of.

But all the freshmen, some sooner than others, will stop taking pictures of the squirrels. You can live in the most beautiful place on earth, and awe will give way to mundanity 99 percent of the time. You can be surrounded by books and laboratories and observatories, and yet always keep your eyes on your feet. You can live within blocks—within meters—of a profound diversity of ideas, and spend all your time feeling superior to those with whom you don’t agree, seeing humans as faceless parts of easy-to-despise blocs. We complain about the out-of-touchness of the elderly, or the obnoxiousness of children; the laziness of the 47 percent, or the depravity of the 1 percent.

And this—all these reasons—is why we profoundly need wonder: why we ache for it even when we don’t know what we ache for, why we pen columns of mangled eloquence and scrambled ideas. Thinking on wonder, in fact, should make us think of our faults, our elitism and dehumanization, our mistreatment of others, because it brings the platitude “we’re all human” to glorious 3-dimensional motion, because everyone, no matter where they’re from or how intelligent they are or what disagreeable views they hold, felt awe when they first saw the sea. When we wonder, we might have the innocence and joy of a child, but we can also imagine how it might be to have the wisdom of age. Wonder—and the beauty and community which bring it about—might not be what Harvard students want, but it is what we need.

It doesn’t matter if you’re young, old, rich, poor—wonder, like love and death, is one of the great equalizers. Wonder transcends place, along with nearly every other category (inherent or constructed) that tears at our humanity. After a near-missed car accident in a concrete wasteland, strangers feel the wonder of being alive. Wonder is something the newborn child feels as she looks at a blanket for the first time, what the middle-aged person feels as she paints the sunset. Wonder is when you walk into a church in Germany or a mosque in Casablanca or the secular cathedral of Sanders Theatre. People are not the same. Religions are not the same. But we all can—or have—experienced wonder. And we all can—or have—failed to put a finger on what it is. And that’s okay: Can we fully explain anything we consider integral to the human condition?

So how to do that? Like many important things, wonder can’t be forced, but we can make ourselves more open to it, starting with our studies. The possibility of wonder is obvious in disciplines like Physics and English, but also in learning new languages, in piecing together arguments, even in struggling over an Ec10 pset in Lamont with friends and classmates.

Wonder does not have to be divorced from politics or economics or real-world issues; it can and should influence how we think about things from Final Clubs to food ethics to mental health. The world is too terrible for any one thing to remain unconnected from the heaviness of life. But let there be a healthy wall of separation, lest the reasons for living become conflated with the means of production, lest we forget why you work for greater income equality, or education for girls, or to make the world better in any way.

While people often suggest physically getting out of the campus bubble as a stimulus for wonder and cure for Harvard-itis (and I wholeheartedly agree), this can be difficult because of time, money, or anxieties. We live in an incredible place, and there’s so much to do without leaving the gates. Read for fun. Photograph squirrels. Take “useless classes” unrelated to your major (now you can do this for credit)! Become more involved in your faith or service or dorm community, and do that well, do it until the mundane becomes lovely from shared humanity.

Bask in the sunset of the Radcliffe Quad and relax. Stop thinking about politics for a moment, or ten, and start thinking about how your concentration relates to why life matters. Talk about that which makes you happy to be alive, and talk and listen with the sorts of people you haven’t thought to talk to. Because when we wonder at the universe, we are forced not only to see how small we are, but also how large—how our tiny selves can hold so much.

Siobhan McDonough ’17, a social studies concentrator, lives in Kirkland House.