Wonder: Insights from Herman Melville, Paris Geller and C. S. Lewis
A week ago my husband and I were on a cruise.
Usually when I travel, I pack “comfort books,” knowing that I likely won’t have time to read. They’re to have on hand just in case. (What’s worse than realizing you’ve stumbled upon the perfect time and place to read a book, but you don’t have one?!) This trip, thankfully, provided ample reading time. And so on the top deck surrounded by the rhythm of the ocean and steel drums, I pondered Moby Dick’s Chapter 37, “Sunset.”
Like many readers of Herman Melville’s great work, I haven’t actually read the whole of Moby Dick all the way through. Usually one or two chapters in a sitting provides more than enough to scratch one’s head at…like Ahab’s mournful reflection of sunsets having lost their appeal.
Yonder, by the ever brimming goblet’s rim, the warm waves blush like wine. The gold brow plumbs the blue. The diver sun — slow dived from noon, — goes down; my soul mounts up! she wearies with her endless hill. …
Oh! time was as the sunrise nobly spurred me, so the sunset soothed. No more. This lovely light, it lights not me; all loveliness is anguish to me, since I can ne’er enjoy. Gifted with the high perception, I lack the low, enjoying power; damned, most subtly and most malignantly! damned in the midst of Paradise!
The captain’s lament precedes Ishmael’s own rumination later in Chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” Like Ahab, Ishmael suspects that “low” pleasures like sunsets and color are just a distraction from the terrible reality, of which the wise are aware:
And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues — every stately or lovely emblazoning — the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnelhouse within and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colourless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge — pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him.
A Worldview of Wonder
Over the course of our cruise, my husband and I were like young Ahab. Spurred by sunrises and soothed by sunsets. The kind of people who, unlike Paris Geller in Gilmore Girls, “get happy looking at a sunset.”
In fact, we made a point to get up every morning at 6:00 a.m. and rush to the top deck to marvel at the sunrise, and made our nightly rounds on the top deck again to see sunset colors give way to moonlight reflections.
And as I stood on the decks, watching the clouds, the horizon, the sun, the moon, and the unfathomable waves around and beneath us, I couldn’t help but wonder. As a Christian, I couldn’t help but praise God for the beauty he’d created and give thanks for my opportunity to enjoy it.
I guess that’s the difference between me and Ahab or Ishmael, between the Christian worldview and the worldview on the Pequod. The more I learn about reality the more I marvel at it, because I believe the further you go into what’s real the more beautiful life gets.
The opposite view is bleak, but ubiquitous. It makes time on earth shallow, because it requires that the things here only be enjoyed on a surface level in order to avoid existential dread. You can’t dive into too many layers of anything (like I discussed in a previous blog post) because you won’t like what you find. In fact, you might find nothing. Keep it shallow.
The Christian worldview invites us into infinite depths of experience. Happiness is deeper because it’s just the tip of an iceberg of joy. Pain is more poignant because we know that it’s a violation of what’s right—not just chance. But even pain can produce fruitful hope of the reality to come. Beauty is more alluring because the more you explore it, the more you see, knowing all the time it’s only a foggy-mirror reflection of the real stuff.
Enjoying Beauty Freely
On the drive to and from Galveston, we had time for another book: C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces (Wanda McCaddon’s narration is fantastic). Psyche’s explanation of longing is what it’s like for a Christian to know that the broken beauty we behold in this life is only a taste of the truth:
It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine … Do you remember? The color and the smell, and looking across at the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. … The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from.
I believe that Ahab, Ishmael, and Paris Geller were all wrong. It’s not “low” or naive to get happy looking at a sunset; it’s an acknowledgement of truth. There is a place where all the beauty came from, and there is more. When we accept this, we can wonder at the imperfect beauty of this world with freedom, whether by enjoying an ocean view or a good book. Or both.
