That Sense of Wonder

the paths are barred.

You dress up like Father Christmas, but only a seriously maladjusted adult would believe they are, indeed, Father Christmas

Anthropologists say that magic is (among other things) a strategy used by the dispossessed to make their existence bearable. Take, for example, the peasants of southern Italy, the hardened line of labourers of the region I come from. They were poor, they were at the bottom of a feudal hierarchy and they toiled in a harsh land

a child, I felt in awe of my big brothers. They were role models to me; more than that, inspirations. I didn’t make my choices, I made the choices I thought they would make. They loved me truly, but our power dynamic was imbalanced. I was utterly helpless in the face of their whims. If they decided to hang out with their girlfriends on a Sunday afternoon rather than stay at home and watch cartoons with me, my world would crumble, and I would be desperate, lonely and forlorn. Children must go with the tide, like the servants of feudal masters. Part of the reason they feel magic so intensely is that they hope magic will give them a level of power they do not, in fact, possess

be sweet, reasonably clean and adorably mischievous, but if you have ever seen a real child, or you have the faintest memory of what being one was really like, you know the truth. Children are brutes. They are self-centred, demanding and unscrupulous, or, as J. M. Barrie put it at the end of Peter Pan, ‘heartless’. But let’s cut them some slack: they have to be like that in order to survive, vulnerable and dependent as they are. They are fumbling around in a bewildering new world where everything and everyone is bigger and stronger than they are. Their sense of wonder grows in dark, shadowy places

But there must be a better option than returning to a state in which we were barely potty-trained.

Lose your sense of wonder, and you’ll end up wasting time fretting over your career prospects, your social status and the size of your bank account, or even sending angry tweets about little fighting cocks of men; reclaim it, and you will enrich immeasurably your experience of the world; you will find the strength and courage to change yourself, and – who knows? – even to change the world. Einstein did. That may be because he was cleverer than most people, including you. Or perhaps he just wondered more.

So, the question is: how

those who have a why to live can bear with almost any how

He then adds, rather ominously: ‘Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.’

Even an accountant can temper the rigours of the balance sheet with nights spent debating the meaning of life.