Just because I don't climb up to the top of the rabbit's fur, doesn't mean I can't.

I believe that Albert Knox’s statement that “in the process of growing up we lose the ability to wonder about the world” means through time and living through experiencing, we eventually are not surprised by what we see in the world, simply because they become expected stimuli and therefore we stop feeling the need to ponder excessively about them. In short, we lose a sense of curiosity for the world around us.

Using an analogy of a magician pulling a rabbit from the top hat of the universe, Knox also states that as people “grow older they work themselves ever deeper into the [rabbit’s] fur.” To a certain extent, I agree with this. As we grow older, we are forced to be mature and take care of certain issues such as the rent, the economy, earning enough money to live comfortably, to name a few. These become important aspects of our lives as we depend on them to get by. Who would rather think about the origins of the universe over how to earn money for food and shelter, if they are entirely independent? Imagine a single working mother, who has to juggle two jobs and take care of her children; would she have the time to muse over the elementary building blocks of life? Even as we are growing up, we mostly think about things that are important to us. As a high school student, I personally would concern myself more about my grades and my performance in school; rarely have I found myself thinking about questions such as “where does the world come from?”. Even Sophie reacts to “annoying questions” like these with “surely nobody really knows”. This is because they lead on to more questions and eventually we realize that it is an endless chain of wondering, and ultimately we dodge and run back towards the issues that matter only to ourselves. However, this does not mean we have lost the ability to wonder; we just choose not to for the time being because there are no definite answers and there more important, immediate things on our minds.

Also, I think that it depends on a person’s character. Some people may just be born to be more apathetic or more concerned about themselves, and therefore do not have the desire to ponder about the world – again, this does not mean that they have lost the ability to do so. As Knox says, we “either fool ourselves and the rest of the world by pretending that we know all there is to know, or we can shut our eyes to the central issues once and for all”. Yet, just because we are indifferent to philosophical questions does not automatically mean that we have delved so deep within the “rabbit’s fur” that we are stuck there forever.