The Power of Wonder: Finding Meaning in Music and Life

Humanity's hunger for meaning and connection defines us as a species. Göran Rosenberg reminds us that we satisfy this hunger with what is available.

ESSAY. Ten years ago, I was asked to say a few words before a New Year's concert in a church in Stockholm. The church was filled to the last seat, and I don't think it was because of me. After the speech, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony awaited, and if anything today can fill a church, it is music. I would even dare to say that if anything today can put people in a state of reverence, make them feel awe before something greater than themselves, even perceive the presence of the God in whose name our churches are built, it is when music flows through the church room; Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, or Handel's Messiah, or Bach's Christmas Oratorio, or just a lone voice.

Birgitta Trotzig spoke in an interview many years ago about humanity's "immense hunger for truly religious forms of expression," and suggested that if Bach (or Beethoven) can fill "even very large cathedrals," it corresponds to "a very broad public's sense of what the sacred truly is."

I share Birgitta Trotzig's view on humanity's "immense hunger," which in turn is fueled by our immense need for meaning. I don't believe humanity can remain human in a world without meaning, as we are doomed to repeatedly try to connect with the world and find our place in it. No other species, as far as I know, needs to seek its place in the world, but the human species is born with that need—and thus the hunger. I see the hunger manifesting more clearly today than yesterday, just as it has become clearer what kinds of misanthropic and self-destructive "meanings" we are, in the worst case, ready to satisfy it with.

One of my intellectual companions through life has been the author Arthur Koestler (1905–1983). After experiencing two devastating world wars and witnessing a Cold War nuclear terror balance turn humanity's survival into a matter of a button press or two, he decided in the mid-1950s, after a dramatic life as a politically engaged journalist and author, to devote the rest of his life to the mystery of humanity—before humanity ended the mystery by ending itself. Perhaps there were still unforeseen insights to gain, dizzying discoveries to make, unimaginable genetic mutations to hope for. "Perhaps unexpected findings in research [...] will give us a new spiritual self-understanding, a new foundation for our metaphysical beliefs, a new intuitive sense of our ultimate responsibility."

A self-inflicted climate catastrophe was not on Koestler's map, but it is on mine.

Koestler would go on to write books and essays with titles like "Science and Emotion," "Creativity and Unconsciousness," "Truth and Beauty." He would launch bold hypotheses and theories, such as the idea that humanity's inability to balance emotion and reason, and thus its tendency for self-destruction, was an evolutionary mistake, the result of an insufficiently developed connection between a newer and an older part of the brain, between the part associated with logic and thinking and the part associated with emotions and instincts.

Koestler remains a fascinating author, still worth discovering, not necessarily because he was always right in his hypotheses and theories (he often wasn't) but because the question he sought to answer, how to save humanity from itself, has become even more pressing, and the deadline seemingly even shorter. A self-inflicted climate catastrophe was not on Koestler's map, but it is on mine.

There are those who think that life's continuation on Earth would be better secured without humanity, and in some sense, perhaps it is so, but if humanity disappeared, the only species that developed the ability to marvel at the world, or creation, or the cosmos, or whatever we choose to call the constellation of improbabilities that it took the biosphere billions of years to produce, would also disappear. In an attempt to find an ethic for "the technological civilization," the German-Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas (1903–1993) formulated something he called "the principle of responsibility." Humanity's unique ability to change all life on Earth must be able to be combined with the equally unique ability to marvel at it and take responsibility for it.

What both Koestler and Jonas sought from vastly different starting points was a new era's connection between wonder and responsibility.

When I was invited to give my New Year's speech in the church, I had just spent the Christmas holiday with Pastor John Ames in Gilead. Gilead is the name of a mountain in the Bible, and of a very small town in the American Midwest, and of a novel by the American author Marilynne Robinson. Gilead is not on any U.S. map, and Pastor John Ames is not in any church records, but if there had been the slightest possibility, I would have let him give the speech in my place.

Children may be allowed to marvel, but adults should know better.

John Ames in Gilead is continuously amazed by Creation, if one may say so about everything there is for a person to experience in life, regardless of whether it is God or Chance that is said to be behind it all. And I don't think it's because he has failed to read any of those who say there is really nothing to marvel at since everything that exists has an exhaustive physical or chemical or biological explanation, yes, even wonder itself, and that to the extent we still marvel, it is either due to ignorance or chemical processes in the brain—or both.

Children may be allowed to marvel, but adults should know better.

John Ames is not a child; he is an old man who is about to die and who very late in life has had a son he wants to make aware of a few things before he closes his eyes again.

"I sometimes feel like a child opening its eyes to the world—and seeing the most wondrous things it will never find words for—and then having to close them again," John Ames writes to his son. "I have lived my whole life on the prairie, and a row of oaks can still amaze me."

I too can marvel at oaks (there is a particular one in my life), but especially I marvel over and over again at all the seemingly very small things that together form the very large thing we call Society. It may seem childish, but I can still be amazed that society functions, that clean water comes out of the tap, both hot and cold, and electricity from the socket, and nowadays the internet from somewhere, unclear how, and that the garbage is collected, and that there is fresh bread and fresh oranges in the store, and that strangers sometimes smile at each other on the street, and that one can somewhat trust that the buses and trains and banks work and that what works today will work tomorrow too.

In Sweden, there has been much to marvel at in my lifetime.

I may find it easier than others to imagine that it doesn't always have to be so, that society can even collapse one fine day and the banks stop working and people stop smiling at each other and that it can all end really badly.

In my family, societal collapse is not far away—a generation only—and a functioning society, not to mention a good society, is therefore easier to marvel at than in families for whom society has been there generation after generation.

In Sweden, there has been much to marvel at in my lifetime.

All those things that suddenly became possible for everyone—higher education, work, housing, social security—all those things that made older generations pinch themselves to understand they weren't dreaming.

But which we no longer marvel at because we now take them for granted.

Just as we recently took peace in Europe and democracy and freedom for granted.

To be able to marvel, it strikes me, is to never take anything for granted.

Those who still marvel that food is on the table every morning, and perhaps even bless it, still have something to teach.

I also believe there is a connection between wonder and joy.

John Ames sees his son playing with a friend in the rainbow-hued drops from a sprinkler, and they jump and shout and laugh and behave, he writes, just as "every person in their right mind should behave when they encounter something as wondrous as water."

"Joy, beautiful divine spark," sings the choir in the final movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

Friedrich Schiller has no small expectations of joy. Neither does Beethoven, even though some claim that in another political climate, he would have preferred to replace joy with freedom. And that Schiller had thought the same. But in this context, it doesn't matter much whether it is joy or freedom or the divine spark that is celebrated, because what is above all celebrated is the force that makes wondrous things possible in a wondrous world.

The Ode to Joy is a jubilant declaration of love to a world that is ready every morning to awaken our wonder.

Or as Pastor John Ames would have said, a planet that can produce Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony deserves all the attention it can get.

And all the responsibility it can muster.

Göran Rosenberg is an author, journalist, and contributor to Expressen's culture page.