In Chapter 2, Albert Knox states that "It seems as if in the process of growing up we lose the ability to wonder about the world." What does he mean? Do you agree with him? Explain why or why not, using examples from this first section of the novel (pp. 1-120) and your own life experiences.
What Albert Knox was trying to imply by saying that “in the process of growing up we lose the ability to wonder about the world” is that as we grow older, we lose our sense of curiosity and imagination; we stop asking questions like “Who am I?” or “How did the earth come to be?” or “What makes us ‘us’?”. He described the ignorance of an adult as being “so comfortable in a rabbit’s fur that they never risk crawling back up to the fragile hairs again, where they were first born.
I do not fully agree with Albert Knox. I think that no one “loses” their ability to wonder about the world. The ability to wonder is with us from out birth and we carry it to our grave. In fact, we are wondering about different things in the world every single day, be it something amusing or something frustrating. A few questions off the top of my head are “Why does school start so early in the morning?” and “How do automobiles work?”. These are questions that I’ve asked myself recently, and they involve wondering. Curiosity about various things about life is a natural human characteristic; humans were made to question the world and try look for the answers. It is, therefore, inhuman to accept and do everything we’re told, without asking questions. Some may recognize such people as “obedient”, but even the obedient ones wonder to themselves, whether or not they convey it verbally.
I do, however, agree that as we grow up, we lose patience to find answers to the difficult questions of life. Adults tend to get rather caught up in their monotonous routine and life seems to be moving quite quickly for them. Thus, they find questions like “What is life?” frustrating as they know that they won’t be able to come up with a distinct and correct answer.
In conclusion, I feel that Albert Knox had the right idea about people not wanting to face that there are unanswerable questions in life, but he was wrong about the fact that adults tend to lose their ability to wonder due to gaining experience over the years. Grown-ups definitely wonder.
They just don’t have the patience to find the answers.
Hiral Shah
3 comments:
Hi Hiral
I think you are right - and this is something I put in an ealier reply ... adults are too preoccupied to "wonder". I think you make an interesting observation about the idea of "blind obedience" - there have been societies where there has been blind obedience and where society went backwards (morally and ethically)... think Nazi Germany! Perhaps that's why we should keep asking the questions!
Hi Hiral
Also agree mostly with what you have said. There is only one thing.
Are adults too arrogant to admit they do not know the answer? This is what you seem to be implying, that they don't want to ask a question they can't answer.
Many adults do want to find out and learn new things they don't know yet. My mum is definitely one who goes out of her way to acquire new knowledge about the world. Every matter be it small "When is the Connections Conference?" or "How did the universe start?". Does this not come under the term wondering?
Hi Hiral,
I partly agree with you with the fact that people don't have the patience to actually sit and think about such questions. But then again I think that there are few questions we wouldn't really think about now. For example, When I learned to walk, I fell down many times, this was also a question for me to why I fell down but when I learned it, it became a habit. Now I fall, I am not curious of why I fell but I would just think that I trip but not that I wasn’t walking properly.So, i do believe that we might be too distracted to wonder but its within us. But on the other hand i also believe that we just aren't curious anymore therefore we don't wander.
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