Staring

Wonder is a good thing, right? Except that I keep coming back to Gulliver’s Travels, in which wonder produces not thoughtfulness or even curiosity but stupefaction. Forty years after Gulliver, The Female American: or, the Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield was published. It was described as “a sort of second Robinson Crusoe; full of wonders, and well calculated to make one sort of readers stare.” That anonymous reviewer caught some of Swift’s point: that wonder can lead to passivity. Also that wonder, which we usually consider in such humanistic terms, can be calculated. My new neighbor works for an ad agency; I doubt he’d find this surprising.