Recently I “discovered” a new (to me) author, and I’m sort of fan-girling. When he is in the zone, his prose is like a classical oil painting. All color and lines and majesty and depth of field. He paints pictures with his words like nothing I’ve ever heard before. I’m talking about Anthony Doerr, and it’s kind of embarrassing that I’ve only stumbled across him now, considering he wrote All the Light We Cannot See, which won a Pulitzer Prize and was made into a movie. (That’ll be my next read.)
I say “heard” because I’m currently listening to his audiobook, “Four Seasons in Rome,” narrated by the author himself, and it’s captivating. It transports you to that wonderful city, and shows it to you through the eyes of someone who loves it and is new enough to it to look upon it with wonder. This is one of the rare occasions when I’d recommend the audiobook over the book, because it sounds like an artistic love song.
This morning, on my drive to work, I was wrapped up in his melody when he broached a really interesting subject: How people saw the world before there were so many images. Think about it: there was a time when people might only see their Queens or Popes or Emperors once in their lives, unless you counted statues and profiles on coins.
What a momentous occasion that must have been. There you are, toiling your way through your drab existence, and suddenly this procession rolls past, the Emperor on a golden chariot, dressed up in his finery, surrounded by sentries in their matching livery, astride horses bedecked with plumage. It is understandable that people such as these would buy into the concept that the Emperor was a god.
That one sighting would provide you with a story to tell for the rest of your life, and it would be one that would fascinate your listeners. Like you, they most likely would never have even ventured very far beyond their own village, so everything over the horizon would hold great mystery. As Doerr mentions, their maps were full of shadows.
To the North, they thought, were savages, and a bitter, inhospitable cold. Occasionally, a traveler would pass by and tell the people stories of other lands, but it would be hard for them to believe in such wonders. They had already imagined wonders of their own.
They thought giants and unicorns and mermaids existed. They believed in witchcraft and magical cures for things that still somehow managed to kill them. They thought that if a pregnant woman wanted a good-looking child, she should only look at good-looking things. They had no idea that increasing earthquakes near smoking mountains spelled disaster.
In a world like that, cut off from information, knowledge, and imagery, everything unknown must have seemed dangerous, everything new must have seemed wondrous. I certainly don’t envy the feeling that everything outside my city’s ramparts poses a threat. And the outlandish stories they made up to fill in the information gaps could be much more terrifying than reality. “Here there be dragons,” as the maps used to say. It would be hard to live under that much anxiety.
But the wonder… the constant awe… the discoveries of even the most basic of things must have been delightful. I would love to experience that. Tradesmen bringing food and spices that you’ve never tasted before. People who look extremely different than you do, dressed oddly and speaking incomprehensively. New inventions all the time. Even flowers from two valleys away might be something you’ve never encountered.
Now, as we endure the constant assault of TV, printed media, and advertisements, we most likely see more images in an hour, and more new things in a day, than those people saw in a lifetime. And we are at a point where more and more of what we see has been falsified. If we no longer believe in dragons, we’ll conjure them up ourselves.
We think we are accustomed to this continual bombardment, but I suspect it has taken its toll. It takes a lot more, now, to fill us with awe. We are in too much of a hurry to stop and consider that something may be miraculous.
There is still a lot that we don’t know and can discover. There’s much to learn about the natural world and the wonders of the universe. We’re not even sure why our bodies do certain things, or how or why they do them.
It is so disheartening that science is being vilified these days, because science is where wonder most often resides. I just worry that we are discovering so much at such a rapid pace that none of us are taking the time to appreciate these discoveries. If you had shown the ancient Romans an electron microscope, they would have lined up around the block to take a look. It would be the hottest ticket in town.
Perhaps the problem is that we have seen too much. In fact, we’ve seen so much that now we have to create things that aren’t real to look at, just to get one another’s attention. That’s tragic, because, as Doerr’s wife Shauna says in the book, “Sometimes the things we don’t see are more beautiful than anything else.”
We are running out of things we haven’t seen. I shudder to think what happens next. Kids in high school today will live in a world so different from ours that I can’t even begin to imagine what it will be like. I just hope, somehow, they find a way to recover some of that wonder and awe. To lose it entirely would be to lose a great deal of what makes us human.
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