There is a myth we live with, a myth of finding the meaning of life – as if meaning is an undiscovered law of natural science. But unlike the laws of physics – which preceded us and will send us and made us – which means that it exists only in this brief encounter of consciousness between chaos and chaos, the cross we call life. When you die – when these orderly atoms sparkle with passion and emotion – they dissolve into an inaudible star and, everything that filled your mind with its rosary of meaningful days will also be gone. From its point of view, it will no longer have a meaning, because the point itself will be dispersed – there will be other people left, making their lives meaningful, including any meaning they may make of your residue.
These are the thoughts that flow in this fleeting galaxy of consciousness as I stand by a green dandelion in mid-June under a hill on my morning run – the dandelion, now a green fiesta where some time ago the little sun of its bloom was, then the ethereal orb of its seed, now long scattered; the dandelion, which exists for no reason better than me, than you – and no worse – by the same laws of physics without explanation: these sections of the best precision written by chance.
And yet, somehow, against the incredible cosmic odds otherwise, we get to experience this sky, these trees, these colors, these loves in which we live. The recognition of this miracle of unlimited fortune is a fundamental matter of explanation – a great awakening in myth.
How to awaken this wonder and begin to make meaning is, of course, the greatest creative challenge of life.
All this – the dandelion, the persistence of wonder as a filter of meaning – reminded me of certain passages GK Chesterton (May 29, 1874-June 14, 1936) – philosopher, the first opponent of eugenics, the main author of several books, several hundred poems and short stories, and several thousand stories The Autobiography of GK Chesterton (public library).
A century after Baudelaire noted that “intelligence is nothing more than a childish recovery of its own accord,” and a generation before Dylan Thomas insisted that “children marvel at the stars, purpose and destiny,” Chesterton looks back at his early life and how it shaped the virtues of his later life as a literary artist and thinker:
The great thing about childhood was that whatever was in it was amazing. It wasn't just a land full of wonders; it was a wonderland.
Considering the folly of pessimism as a way of life, given the incredible good fortune to exist at all in a universe where so much is possible against it, he adds:
No one * knows how much hope he has, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depth of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. Behind our minds… [there is] a forgotten flame or burst of wonder at our existence. An artistic and spiritual life thing [is] dig this amazing sunrise; so that the person sitting in the chair does not immediately understand that he [is] he is actually alive, and happy.
When Chesterton found an art with which to convey this fire of wonder, he found his writing “filled with a new and intense resolution to write against the Decadents and Pessimists who dominated the culture of the age.” He shows:
The main problem for me, certainly chronologically and especially intellectually… was the problem of how men can be made to see the wonder and splendor of life, in places where their daily criticism took it for dead, and their imagination had left it dead.
And so we come to the dandelion:
From the first I had an almost clear sense of those two dangers; the idea that the experience must not be spoiled by presumption or despair… I asked what pre-natal purgations I should have gone through, in order to gain the reward of looking at a dandelion… [or a] sunflower or sun… But there is a way to despise a dandelion that is not for a person who is desperate, but for a person with an annoying attitude. It can be done in different ways; one of them says, “You can get the best dandelions at Selfridges,” or “You can get the cheapest dandelions at Woolworths.” Another way is to look at it with an odd drawl, “Surely no one but Gamboli in Vienna really understands dandelions,” or to say that no one can tolerate an old-fashioned dandelion as the super-dandelion grew in the Frankfurt Palm Garden; or simply scoff at the rigors of giving dandelions, when all the best ladies give you an orchid for your buttonhole and lots of rare exotics to go with you. These are all ways of underestimating something by comparison; because it is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt. And all such comparisons are ultimately based on the strange and wonderful doctrine that man is entitled to dandelions; that in a rare way we can claim the appointment of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe them no thanks at all and need feel no wonder at all; and above all it is no wonder that it is thought fit to receive it.
Get some thought from this season's meditation on the flower and the meaning of life, starring Emily Dickinson, Michael Pollan, and The Little Prince, and revisit Roaring Like a Dandelion — Poet Ruth Krauss' lost song of wonder, found and turned into a contemporary picture book by artist Sergio Ruzzier.
