“It seems if in the process of growing up, we lose the ability to wonder about the world”.

In chapter 2, Albert Knox states that “It seems 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 P1-120 and your own life experiences.

From this quote what I can interpret from it is that as we grow older and become an adult we tend to stop wondering about the world, and all together just stop questioning about life and any questions about our lives and the world. Because we have stopped, we would no longer have the ability to start wondering about the world anymore.

I do not agree with Albert Knox. I think that as we grow up we don’t lose the ability to wonder about the world it’s just that we choose not to, therefore it seems like we lost the ability to. While growing up we constantly meet different challenges and obstacles and because of these we may not have sufficient time to start wondering about the world, but I believe that if an adult was given spare time as well as the right stimulus he or she would start wondering about the world, and think about the big questions.

Some people maybe born with the talent to look and question life and the world they live in, or else there wouldn’t be such people called philosophers. If the quote above is right, then adults and elderly people that are called philosophers are only fakes as they surely must have lost their ability to wonder about the world by now. However some of the most famous philosophers in history like Plato, or Socrates have stimulated philosophers and humans nowadays to look at the world differently. Both philosophers mentioned there are adults, or at least grown men, this proves that the above quote mentioned by Albert Knox is wrong.

I quite liked the theory in the book of the rabbit in the hat trick. However I don’t think that we are all sitting cozily in the depths of the rabbit’s fur, whilst philosophers are trying to climb out of it. Every human when arrive to this world have a job, and the job would change as they grow older. When being a child their job maybe just to be a good daughter or son and stay out of trouble, when being a student it might be being a good daughter or son, stay out of trouble as well as getting good grades. When being an adult their job would be the responsibilities of a child and a student as well as getting a good job as well as…etc. As a human grows older generally there would be more and more responsibilities with how old there are to a certain extent. Therefore they would be getting busier and having less time to wonder about the world. However if your job is a philosopher or something related to this then well, you would most certainly question more about the world than most humans as your job is to do so! Therefore I don’t think that we are sitting cozily in the rabbits fur, we just don’t have the sufficient time to start wondering about the world. We do not lose the ability to wonder, we just do not have the time to do so.

POSTED BY: CLARA CHAN