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?