Wonder is a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable: In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Cabinets of Curiosities (Wunderkammern) were private collections of notable objects and were at the origin of museums. They displayed natural wonders alongside works of art and various man-made feats of ingenuity. Modern terminology would categorize the objects they included as belonging to natural history (sometimes faked), geology, ethnography, archaeology religious or historical relics, works of art (including cabinet paintings), and antiquities. But in the earlier collections, the wonders of God were spread out cheek-by-jowl with the wonders of man, both presented as aspects of the same thing: the Wonder of God. (John Walsh interview, in in Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s cabinet of Curiiosities, p.61).
In Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Lawrence Weschsler calls the Museum of Jurassic Technologyin Los Angeles the worthy heir of the wonder cabinets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, inasmuch as “wonder, broadly conceived, is its unifying theme….but it’s a special kind of wonder, and it’s metastable.” The visitor to the Museum “finds himself shimmering between wondering at (the marvels of nature) and wondering whether (any of this could possibly be true). (p.60)
“Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?” from a line in a Marx Brothers film.
“Discovering Columbus’ 2012
In Marvelous Posessions: The Wonder of the New World, Steven Greenblatt describes wonder as “the central figure in the initial response to the New World, the decisive emotional and intellectual experience in the presence of radical difference….The expression of wonder stands for all that cannot be understood, that can scarcely be believed. It calls attention to the problem of credibility and at the same time insists on the undeniability…of experience.” (Weschler, p.79)
The New World seemed to be exactly what it was called. The extreme length of the voyage, the inaders’ total unfamiliarity with the land, their absolute ignorance of its inhabitants’ cultures, languages, socio-political organizations, and beliefs made it so. (p. 55)
According to Greenblatt, wonder is ideologically malleable, and he seeks to follow its trajectory “from medieval wonder as a sign of dispossession, to Renaissance wonder as an agent of appropriation.” (Greenblatt, p. 24)
In the “Age of Wonder”, men of science could look upon wonder or marvel as one of the essential components of the study of nature and the unraveling of its secrets. Wonder defined, as it was up to the end of the eighteenth century, as a form of learning — an intermediate, highly particular state akin to a sort of suspension of the mind between ignorance and enlightenment that marks the end of unknowing and the beginning of knowing. (Weschler, p. 90, in reference to Adalgisa Lugli, ”Inquiry as Collection”.)
Cabinets of Wonder were above all accumulations. They were not arranged by categories or consistency. In the twentieth century, JL Borges would convey the flavor of lists of objects without a common theme.
For example here is his list of animals:
those that belong to the Emperor, embalmed ones, those that are trained, suckling pigs, mermaids, fabulous ones, stray dogs, those included in the present classification,
Deyrolle after the fire
In A Sense of Wonder, Carson wrote: “I believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we will have for destruction.”