Water Falls From the Sky
A Rumination
I was coming down off acid one morning on my friend Richie’s porch. We were still in that wild afterglow where everything feels likes it might be breathing. I was leaving, the sun was coming up, and a light rain was falling. He lived in a nice colonial house with outdoor columns supporting a high roof with an oversized lantern hanging above as a porch light. I turned as I left, Richie still wide-eyed and smiling as he stood in the open door.
“Sometimes, man, water just falls from the sky,” I said to him, gesturing with one hand to the falling rain.
He just laughed. It was a full, loud laugh that came up from his belly and came back again from the hillside and the columns around me.
He shook his head at me, laughed again, and closed the door.
I thought about this moment the other day, watching my son run through the rain, his arms outstretched, shouting, “Rain! Rain! Rain!”
Sometimes, little buddy, water just falls from the sky.
I know that rain can be explained. We can talk about air pressure, water-saturation, coalescence, and fragmentation. We can talk about hydrogen and oxygen. About weather fronts, convection, and orographic effects. But isn’t that beside the point?
I think about this moment often. The stupid simplicity of it. It explains a lot about why I ended up a philosopher, or, barring that, a writer. Philosophers will quote Socrates, or some version of Aristotle, claiming that “philosophy begins in wonder.” They say that to their first-years, but I don’t think they believe it. Professional philosophers, philosophers who have been professionalized, are not very wondrous in my experience. If you are lucky, they are a basically pleasant bureaucrat, to borrow the words of Liam Kofi Bright. But more often, in my experience, they live to crush the wonder from others because they have An Argument.
Arguments are, or have become, the least wondrous things in the world.
Wonder is maybe not thinking, not yet, but it gets the gears turning. It sets things in motion and is, therefore, unsettling. You think you’ve got a nice idea there and then you start wondering about it, which undoes the comfortable illusion that ideas provide — the illusion that they are fixed and eternal things that map neatly onto a world as it is itself, independent of human experience. I have no clue what that would mean, but it sure seduced Plato or at least had him wondering long and hard about the matter.
Actually, people don’t like to wonder. They like their fixed ideas. Their fixed idea does something, it has proven useful somehow. Wondering is a useless venture. Worse than useless! It actively undoes the good progress you’ve made toward storing up knowledge, logging ideas away in a nice vault where they can be called upon and trotted out, and put on display to show how smart and resourceful you are, what a great many thing you know, how sure you are, and with which you can basically identify. A static storehouse of knowledge gives the appearance of solidity and is a good surface onto which to project your own self image. Somewhere in there, among the storage crates containing ark-like knowledge, is you, your ego. And you are very smart.
Wonder, much like acid actually, fucks with this image. It brings to mind that old truth, also attributed to Socrates, that really you know only one thing. That is, you know nothing. You are no one. Just another drop of rain dissolving among the rings in a pond.
If we get to thinking too much we find we are rifling through those crates, turning out the packing materials, loose straw and peanuts, and all these boxes are empty. They’re labeled, naturally. Stuff should be in here. But as soon as you start wondering about it, as soon as you go looking, it’s gone. All that is solid and such.
I’ve found, even in philosophy, people fucking hate that shit. They want the storehouse. They want knowledge without the wondering.
I’m not saying wonder is opposed to knowledge. It’s just that knowledge is settling. It’s saying, “we’ve come far enough, thank you very much. Here and no further.” But some of us keep pushing at the edge, wondering what’s beyond. We have no idea how to get there of course. If we did, we wouldn’t need wonder.
Maybe I’m a romantic. I do love nature.
And, it’s true, science has led to a great treasure-trove, an unprecedented storehouse of knowledge that is, frankly, something beyond useful in the extent of its effects. But isn’t it really just an ever more fine-grained way of cutting up the world into pieces? Some of these pieces aren’t even particularly digestible. In fact, some of the finest-grained bits are the hardest to swallow.
What I’m trying to say is, aren’t we just deferring the question? Isn’t that edge just receding the closer we draw to it? The greater our area of knowledge, the more its perimeter exposes us to the unknown all around. I like wonder because it can let us sit with that for a minute.
Or eight hours, if you’re on acid, I guess.
It might be these associations that turn off so many very serious thinkers. “Child-like wonder,” we say. Navel-gazing. Wondering can sometimes make us feel a little stupid.
But I think that’s a false impression.
To be stupefied it is be stuck, stopped in your tracks. It is the end of wonder, not in knowledge, but in disappointed ignorance. Stupidity is to be frozen before the empty crate. Wonder is moving, seeking, still trying at new lids, at the edge of a new horizon.
I know I will insult some philosophers who will think I’m talking about them. Or else they’ll say, “hey now, I love to wonder! This isn’t me!” I doubt that many philosophers will read this, especially those who have given up on wonder or who never had it in the first place.
But even so, if you find yourself with a lot of labels on boxes, watch out! If you’re having a conversation with someone who is trying to explain themselves, their views, and you find yourself saying, “oh, so you’re an —” where there’s some neat name or -ism you can tag them with, beware! That is the end of thought. You’ve got it! You can stop, now. You’ve got their number. But numbers can be pernicious things.
Acid is not for everyone, but I’d like to hope that wonder is. It is dangerous, or it can be.
Whatever the case, I’m often grateful to my younger self, to my toddler son, for giving me this reminder, for leaving me with this call to wonder.
Sometimes, water just falls from the sky.