Wonderlust

There’s a lot of stuff that needs explaining out there, and the question of why growing old means growing bored is just one that Tony Hiss tackles in his essay “Wonderlust.” Hiss’ phenomena ‘deep travel’ might be a little mystically named for my taste, but he and I can agree on it’s existence. I have felt the same thing coming off the Big Horn mountains, when the endless prairie first comes into view from their Eastern slope, when I realize that it was all ocean once. It’s a realization of one’s location, not just geographically, but also in time and in the grand scheme of it all. Deep travel is what I would call ‘adult wonder,’ like wine is ‘adult juice.’ Hiss refers to Rachel Carson’s posthumous book The Sense of Wonder to point out how easily one’s sense of wonder at the world is lost along with youth. This too I have experienced for myself. Is it too early for me to be seeing only the drabest colors, or am I far behind my age group, at least in the joy I take from the world? I’ve questioned this of both myself and my generation, and I’ve found two answers. On my first reading of “Wonderlust,” I wrote in the margins how I believed that the most recent generations seem to have become much better at retaining their childhood senses of wonder, most likely thanks to the soft environment they’ve grown up in. But in contrast, during the writing of this essay, I formed the separate opinion that today’s youth (me) is losing its lust for wonder far quicker than generations before, as I see daily how everyone scrambles to be the toughest, the most responsible, the most adult, and I too am part of that scramble. But is that where I lost my sense of wonder? Is my poetry and my precious quiet evenings not genuine wonder? Or are they simply my own escape into deep travel? I’ve still got questions, Hiss.