To behold, in praise of wonder

MUKUL SHARMA

WITH classic self-referential of irony, Shakespeare ended one sonnet: “For we which now behold these present days, have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.” Never mind that the great bard had enough gift of the gab, the likes of which the rest of us can’t even dream of acquiring in more than 400 years, he still took one thing most certainly for granted: that at least we had eyes to wonder. Actually, most of us don’t. This doesn’t mean we should all of us immediately, as Blake put it, begin to “see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower,” but should there not even be an E for effort extended here? Because, for whatever reason the act of creation — or evolution — may have had, it has limited our vision to an extremely narrow band of the entire electromagnetic spectrum; what we call “visible” light. Our brains are simply not wired to experience any other wavelength besides those of the rainbow, whereas various other animals’ very lives depend on being able to perceive infrared, ultraviolet and polarised light — besides being able to “see” things like electricity and magnetism. Our eyes don’t possess the visual acuity of a hawk that can spot a minute meal moving miles away, nor that of an owl whose optics allow 360 degree night-vision for detecting a dormouse in near total darkness. What we do have, however, are great minds that have produced marvellous inventions to amplify and augment our sight — such as telescopes and microscopes — which are probably the closest technological approximations to poetry. In fact, the New Age American social thinker and writer, Theodore Roszak, says: “Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope.” Yet how many of us ever look through their lenses to get a glimpse of what lies beneath or beyond? These are our present days too for us to behold now, as were those in Shakespeare’s time. To watch the pall of ennui evaporate from the eyes of an eight or 80-year-old child, show him the clarity of life in a drop of stagnant pond water magnified a thousand times. Or let her watch in astonishment as the clouds of the Milky Way resolve themselves into million pinpoints of separate suns in the sky. Moreover, wonder is not a one-way street; whatever is wondered at must surely wonder back some time and, who knows, perhaps it doesn’t lack our tongue to praise what it sees.