Oxford: wonder

I have mixed feelings about wonder. I kind of maybe really want it, and it also seems maybe kind of boring.

Part of me thinks, ‘wonder is just a kind of feeling you can have about certain things’, which seems disappointing — like, I want there to be something grander and more on theme with transcendence and mystery than having a certain kind of physical breathiness and wide-eyedness and sense of reeling at certain stimuli. I want pursuing wonder to not be structurally identical to pursuing money or Pokemon except with a slightly different flavor of feeling slotted in.

But maybe wanting to feel wonder is not wanting the emotional experience of wonder, it is wanting things that are wondrous — which, for the proper experience, one might also want to feel wonder about. Things that are wondrous seem by definition better positioned to be satisfyingly non-boring.

So, if wondrous things themselves are charged with supplying all of the wondrousness — legitimate, worthy wondrousness, properly warranting wonder — can anything live up to it? Is anything wondrous? Do I just sometimes mistakenly feel wonder?