I remember when my older brothers told me that Father Christmas was real. I can’t be sure whether it is an actual memory or a patchwork of truth and fiction I conjured up later, but the mental picture is there, crystal clear. I was sitting on a bed under a huge Duran Duran poster, my legs dangling a good distance from the floor. Though it must have been late autumn, the day was warm. My two brothers were standing right in front of me and I was craning my neck to be sure I took in their every word. I looked up at them. You would have done the same: they wore the coolest sunglasses, listened to the best music and hung out with the smartest kids in town; and yet they still took time off from their busy schedules to kick a football with me.
‘He has a big belly,’ said Gigi.
‘Like dad’s?’ I asked. My father was still in perfect health and I thought that would never change.
‘Bigger!’ replied Gigi, air-drawing a seriously prodigious belly with an expansive circular movement of his arms.
Arcangelo added, ‘He needs all that fat to keep warm. He lives at the North Pole, you know. With penguins.’
I so wanted to believe. But due diligence was required here, and I probed further: ‘And he’s the one who brings us presents at Christmas? Are you sure about that?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘To all children? Across the whole world?’
‘Yup.’
‘He goes around the world in one night?’
‘He travels on a sledge,’ said Gigi, as if that settled the matter.
I looked at the sunny day outside, and doubts began to creep into my mind. Sledges ran on snow, I knew that much. But I also knew we didn’t see a lot of snow in southern Italy. No, wait, we didn’t see any snow. My Christmas presents were at risk.
Arcangelo seemed to detect my concern. ‘It’s a flying sledge,’ he explained. ‘It doesn’t need any snow.’
‘But how’s that possible?’
‘Because it flies.’
‘Yes, but how?’
‘It flies by magic,’ said Gigi.
And that settled the matter; magic made sense to me back then, as it still does, albeit in a different fashion.
That was the first Christmas I can remember. On Christmas Eve, I left out biscuits and a glass of milk for Father Christmas, then lay awake for hours, tossing and turning under the covers. I awoke the next morning at six o’clock, leaped out of bed, roused the other members of my family – and dashed to the Christmas tree, where, sure enough, presents had appeared, the glass had been emptied and the biscuits had been eaten, only crumbs remaining.
I don’t remember what I got. But I remember very clearly the crumbs and the empty glass.
Presents were only presents, only things, and the novelty of things wears off quickly. But the empty glass and the crumbs – they were something more. They proved that Father Christmas had actually flown across the sky and slid down my chimney. The crumbs and the glass – they were magic.
It might be tempting to explain children’s excitement at the presents Father Christmas brings as the greed of spoiled brats. That is true, in part. There is another truth, and this is the one that matters. Children are excited because Father Christmas comes from a world of magic. The stuff they get for their birthday is not remotely as exciting: they know where it comes from, and it is not from a magic man on a flying sledge. The story of Father Christmas is a lot more than a white lie: it is a different sort of truth, a sprinkle of fairy dust that turns plastic dolls into talismans and teddy bears into totems. In short, into objects of wonder.
Time went by. The Eighties marched on with their madness of inglorious politics, horror films and synth music, and at some point the harsh truth sank in: it was Mum and Dad who bought – and brought – me the presents; there was no magic involved, only a cold exchange of cash for goods. I don’t remember when or how I learned that this was the case, perhaps because the discovery caused me such disappointment. The merciless light of reason had broken the spell, and Christmas would never be the same again.
Don’t get me wrong, I continued to like Christmas, and I still do. I enjoy the warmth, the coming together of family and friends, even with the seasonal feuds and fights and cutting remarks fuelled by drink. Although I grumble and whine, as busy adults are required to do, I still have a good time. And I still get presents.
But they are never quite as good as the ones I received as a child. How could they be? They don’t come down the chimney any more. I am happy to be a functioning adult and I would never want to be a child again, but when I am feeling a bit down, when the going is getting tough on a cold night in February, I miss the crumbs and the empty glass.
Sometimes, I’ll admit, I miss Father Christmas.
*
All of us experience a sense of wonder at some point in our lives. Perhaps you felt it when you gave your first kiss; when you grasped the perfectly balanced beauty of an equation; when you glimpsed the divine in the rose windows of Chartres Cathedral; when you poured your soul into a painting; when you surprised yourself by taking part in an orgy; or was it when you went sky-diving and then drummed until dawn? Whatever the circumstance that triggered the feeling, you were left speechless by this extraordinary world of ours. We speak different languages, cling to different ideas about politics and spirituality, even different notions of love, but a longing for wonder connects us all through space and time: the cabbie who slows down at night to look at the skyline over the Thames; the sage working towards his next reincarnation; the atheist sociologist. Amaze me, we ask of magicians, artists and writers. Make me wonder, make me wise, we ask of scientists, philosophers and gods. ‘To survive is not enough,’ said Roga Danar in a memorable episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. ‘To simply exist is not enough.’ Our survival instinct might keep us going, but we need a sense of wonder to be fully alive. Your sense of wonder is the most powerful fuel you have.
So what do you do when you have used it all up?
*
On 23 May 2016 I hit thirty-five, and that night, as I blew out my candles, I realized that they covered the entire cake. I was now closer to middle age than childhood.
By any reckoning I didn’t have a bad life, but neither was I happy. The thing is, I was stuck. I seemed unable to move things forward: over the past few years, all my most exciting projects had been shot down like a sleepy row of sitting ducks. I was ready for new challenges but no one seemed particularly eager to challenge me.
I attributed my dissatisfaction in part, at least, to the political climate: the United Kingdom was at that time locked in a dismal debate about the pros and cons of remaining in or leaving the European Union. The referendum campaign was big on empty sloganizing and short on truth-based argument. A little fighting cock of a man who seemed to me to lack imagination, generosity and any trace of intelligence was clocking up far too much airtime. But at least, I told myself, it would all soon be over. Britain, in that sensible, pragmatic way for which she is famous, would make the right decision. And life would go on as before.
Summer 2016, I decided, was going to be great.
*
For an Italian in London, waking up on 24 June 2016 was not great. Whatever the ultimate wisdom of leaving or remaining, I can confidently say that the morning after the referendum sucked. I had become a stranger overnight.
The day was a blur of texts, phone calls and emails from my British friends expressing their solidarity, their horror, their love; one who had voted Leave called to make it clear it wasn’t about me, it wasn’t about racism or any form of nastiness, and she honestly believed that. My very English neighbour knocked at my door with a slice of lemon cake and a long rant against the result. Paola, my wife (also an Italian, and a psychotherapist working for the NHS), received pretty much the same treatment. I felt very loved.
And also very lonely.
I had been living in London for eight years and until that day I never realized I was an Italian. Not that I thought of myself as English, or as a European for that matter, or as a ‘citizen of nowhere’, to use a slur that a spiteful woman would slap on the likes of me a few months later. I was just a guy. I never cared about politics, I never cared about national identities, and I had been naive enough to think that when people looked at me, they didn’t see an Italian man, they saw just a person.
All at once I became obsessed with politics. I wasn’t worried about the personal consequences of the vote, I was worried about the State of Things, Things in General, Thing-y Things. I went from reading articles on the exploration of Mars and the nature of consciousness to reading articles about trade deals that might never come to pass. I tweeted and retweeted furiously, and talked and talked. I made my voice heard. Surely, through the very quantity of my words, I was making a difference, wasn’t I…? Time passed, and anti-EU sentiment became commonplace, and I felt a little lonelier. I tweeted more furiously than ever, but the more I tweeted, the darker the horizon looked. But there was still hope, I told myself. The US presidential elections were just around the corner, and they would restore sanity to the world.
I couldn’t wait.
I am a terrible political pundit.
*
A new winter came, and my mood plummeted with the temperature. I was anxious about my finances, my health, the possibility of the Third World War breaking out, and the declining quality of superhero films.
‘Do you think I’m depressed?’ I asked my wife one morning over breakfast. ‘If I were your patient, what would you say to me?’
She lifted her eyes from her yogurt to look at me. ‘Honestly?’
‘Yes, but kindly too.’
‘You’re fine. For now.’
‘You’re saying I might become depressed then.’
‘I’m saying you’re worrying too much.’
‘How could I not?’ I started to heat up. ‘Have you seen the state of the world?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s horrendous! Modern politics is…’
She raised a hand to stop me, and said, ‘Plato.’
‘What about Plato?’
‘The Theaetetus, specifically.’
‘I’ve read Plato’s Theaetetus.’
‘Read it again.’
‘But…’
‘Please?’
At the time, I thought Paola had said it only to stop me whining. But I was being unfair.
*
The dialogue known as Theaetetus is Plato at his best, for three reasons. First, its main character is Socrates, and Socrates is always fun. Second, it asks the sort of heavy questions that only a writer like Plato could make engrossing (namely: What is knowledge? What do you mean when you say you ‘know’ something?). Third, it ends with a cliffhanger: Socrates, after helping a young man called Theaetetus to become wiser, just drops into the conversation that he has to go to court, as if it were a minor inconvenience. It was actually a major one: Socrates ended up being condemned to death for doing exactly what he has just done with Theaetetus, that is, teaching a young person to think for themselves. Or, as his prosecutors put it, corrupting their minds, which from his accusers’ point of view was entirely reasonable, considering that after talking with Socrates young people became much less willing to shut up and do as they were told.
There is a moment when Socrates shows the clever Theaetetus that he shouldn’t take anything for granted. Socrates says, let’s start with something obvious. We can agree that nothing can become bigger or smaller without changing. If you get bigger, you have changed; likewise if you get smaller. And if you don’t get bigger and don’t get smaller, well, you don’t change. A no-brainer, surely?
Not so fast. Next year, Theaetetus, being a growing boy, will be bigger, while Socrates, being already a grown-up, will not. Socrates hasn’t changed, and yet, when seen from the – now taller – Theaetetus’s point of view, Socrates will be smaller. Socrates will have changed, without changing. See? It is all a matter of perspective.
When Theaetetus admits that he is ‘amazed’, Socrates declares that he must be a philosopher, because ‘wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder’.
Philosophy begins in wonder.
As Paola knew only too well, these words were very important to me. I have always sought wonder. I see myself as a wonder-oriented person. And here were none other than Plato and Socrates stating unambiguously that wonder is – quite literally – fundamental. In cherishing wonder, I was mixing with a very cool crowd indeed.
For an ancient Greek, the word ‘philosophy’ (‘love of wisdom’) had a quite different meaning from the one it has for us today. While for us ‘philosophy’ is a specific discipline, different, say, from physics or theology, for the Greeks a ‘philosopher’ was more of a general knowledge geek, and ‘philosophy’ could express itself in theories about the cosmos, in poems and in riddles, and often in a mix of all three. So, when Socrates says that philosophy begins in wonder, he is actually saying that everything that makes us human – science, art, religion, you name it – begins in wonder. From practical questions about tool-making and house-building to spiritual ones about the nature and power of the gods, it all stems from there. Socrates’ questions to Theaetetus weren’t intended to be answered, but to awaken the boy’s sense of wonder.
Or, in other words, to make him journey back to the source.
*
I had run out of wonder. I knew, intellectually, that wonder was good for me, but how long had it been since the last time I felt amazed, in my guts, in my flesh? I had stopped asking the sort of questions that made me wonder (how will Father Christmas’s sledge reach southern Italy without snow?), because I had too many questions to answer about the mundane matters of life (will my car hang on for another six months?).
It had happened gradually, without my noticing it. You start fretting about tax returns and after a while you don’t have a lot of time left to worry about monsters in the dark: HMRC bureaucrats are scary enough. When I was a child, I used to spend hours sitting on the beach, gazing out to sea. I imagined myself living the life of a pirate, sailing in a ship with Long John Silver and his parrot, making landfall on islands remote and strange. But now I know that I was simply looking at a stretch of the Mediterranean, and that what I saw in the distance was not the jagged masts of the Hispaniola, but the coast of Calabria. With every new thing I learned, another speck of fairy dust was wiped from the surface of my existence, until I was ready, finally, to function in a wholly adult world, and my life was a more or less spotless house. Orderly, cleaned twice a week, no dust at all. Tidy, safe and mind-numbingly boring. Ye gods!
I wanted my wonder back.
*
You have a vague feeling of what I mean by wonder, but you might want a better definition. Let me answer with another question…
…Where are you?
Let’s say you are sitting somewhere. Or standing in an overcrowded train.
All right, but in a wider sense – where are you, now? In a town, or city, or, if you are lucky, somewhere deep in the countryside, reading these words in the shade of a tree. In your imagination, take a step away – and rise. You are looking at the scene from above. Let your eyes get used to this new perspective. You can see a chunk of the planet, defined by geographical boundaries – mountains and rivers and sea. But there are no boundaries if you keep stepping away, because now you are looking at the entire planet from above, and it is a miraculous sphere coloured in blue, white and green – small, fragile and beautiful. And arguing over European Union regulations regarding the curvature of bananas seems completely pointless.
But hang on – did I just say above?
My mistake. There is no above where you are now, because out here, in empty space, there is no up and down. You are just here, floating, lost, pleasantly shipwrecked.
You haven’t stepped away far enough.
Keep stepping away. And look at the solar system: eight tiny marbles circling a bigger one, and all of them moving… you were almost tempted to say ‘forward’, but there is no ‘forward’, only space, and a game of marbles.
Step even further away. Look at the other solar systems surrounding the first one, all dancing and partying to a music you can’t hear (or can you?). Now step away some more, and look at the Milky Way, just one galaxy among many. The further you step away, the more you can see. Galaxies and nebulae and star clusters and planetary systems without number. And then what?
Stay there a few moments.
Stay there.
*
And now dive back in. Jump back to the here and now, to your body, come back to a place where ‘here’ and ‘now’ have a meaning, this human-made town, this small spot of wilderness.
Think about this: all that you have just seen is, in terms of our basic scientific understanding, perfectly real. In a very practical sense, you are twirling in a cosmic dance. Planet Earth is a spaceship, but it is big enough for you to forget what it does. Right now, Spaceship Earth is carrying you through space and time in a vast, vast universe that you know very little about. You think you stand on solid ground? Think again. To say that you are at this moment floating off into space is every bit as true as saying that you have your buttocks on a chair.
That is wonder. Wonder is the emotion you feel when your jaw drops: when you hear music so heart-stopping that it makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck; when an unexpected brainwave makes your head spin; when someone you have always fancied stands stark naked in front of you. Wonder is more than surprise, though of course it contains an element of surprise. Wonder can make you happy, but it can also be terrifying. Wonder shatters what you think about the world. Wonder inspires both the best decisions and the worst mistakes you make in life.
That was what I’d lost.
*
In The World as I See It, Albert Einstein went even further than Plato in defending wonder. He said that ‘the mysterious’ is not only ‘the most beautiful experience we can have’, but also ‘the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science’. He then adds, rather ominously: ‘Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.’ So not only does wonder act as an inspiration for your best endeavours, but also the loss of it kills you, in a way. You survive, but you don’t really live. It’s that Star Trek quotation again.
And yet our society, our schools, our workplaces, go to great lengths to teach us that the opposite is true. They tell us it is important to ‘grow up’ – that’s what you have to do if you want to ‘get on in life’. Growing up means focusing on practical matters; on getting things done; on being a hard-working professional doing a busy job. It means being sensible; it means losing our sense of wonder.
Whoever taught you that, I bet he wasn’t as clever as Albert Einstein.
Einstein’s words tell us that the loss of wonder is not an unavoidable feature of growing up, but a bug – a temporary malfunction. It happens, sure; that doesn’t mean it’s good. Of course we need to develop the skills and behaviours that allow us to take our place as responsible, well-adjusted citizens of the adult world. But we don’t have to throw out our sense of wonder with our childhood toys. Even an accountant can temper the rigours of the balance sheet with nights spent debating the meaning of life.
There is a widespread notion that the older we get, the less creative we become. This is probably true for most of us; but it is not our inevitable fate. Loss of creativity doesn’t happen because of some unstoppable mechanism of ageing, it happens because our sense of wonder fades. We are not as enthusiastic as we once were. We become wearier, less daring, and thus less able to imagine and to create new stuff. And this makes us more prone to anxiety, because our eyes are dimmed, and we can’t see the myriad paths to a better life that are well within our reach, if only we had eyes to see them.
Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, quoted the words of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that ‘those who have a why to live can bear with almost any how’. Frankl had survived several months’ incarceration in Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War, so he knew what he was talking about. But before finding your why, you first need to wonder about it. Lose your sense of wonder, and you’ll end up wasting time fretting over your career prospects, your social status and the size of your bank account, or even sending angry tweets about little fighting cocks of men; reclaim it, and you will enrich immeasurably your experience of the world; you will find the strength and courage to change yourself, and – who knows? – even to change the world. Einstein did. That may be because he was cleverer than most people, including you. Or perhaps he just wondered more.
So, the question is: how?
*
Certainly not by reverting to your inner child. To claim we can only find a sense of wonder by finding the child within is to follow the logic of believing that we are bound to lose wonder as we grow up. If that were really the case, then of course we would have to go back to our childhood as the only enchanted place we had ever known. But there must be a better option than returning to a state in which we were barely potty-trained.
Social convention holds children to be sweet, reasonably clean and adorably mischievous, but if you have ever seen a real child, or you have the faintest memory of what being one was really like, you know the truth. Children are brutes. They are self-centred, demanding and unscrupulous, or, as J. M. Barrie put it at the end of Peter Pan, ‘heartless’. But let’s cut them some slack: they have to be like that in order to survive, vulnerable and dependent as they are. They are fumbling around in a bewildering new world where everything and everyone is bigger and stronger than they are. Their sense of wonder grows in dark, shadowy places.
As a child, I felt in awe of my big brothers. They were role models to me; more than that, inspirations. I didn’t make my choices, I made the choices I thought they would make. They loved me truly, but our power dynamic was imbalanced. I was utterly helpless in the face of their whims. If they decided to hang out with their girlfriends on a Sunday afternoon rather than stay at home and watch cartoons with me, my world would crumble, and I would be desperate, lonely and forlorn. Children must go with the tide, like the servants of feudal masters. Part of the reason they feel magic so intensely is that they hope magic will give them a level of power they do not, in fact, possess.
Anthropologists say that magic is (among other things) a strategy used by the dispossessed to make their existence bearable. Take, for example, the peasants of southern Italy, the hardened line of labourers of the region I come from. They were poor, they were at the bottom of a feudal hierarchy and they toiled in a harsh land. They had no money, no power, no hope of improving their situation. Magic was all they had. The same goes for children.
A child’s enchantment comes with the steep price of helplessness. As grown-ups we are not helpless, not in the way children are, and we should be happy about that. Receiving magical gifts was great, but now you can have more or less what you want (within certain limits, of course), more or less when you want it. You don’t like broccoli? Fine, you don’t have to eat it. Children might feel magic, but adults can work it. They get to be Father Christmas.
You see the paradox here. You get to be Father Christmas only when you realize that Father Christmas is not real, and by then, you don’t have a reason to bother being Father Christmas any more. You would rather be rich, for example. Magic is an escape at best, a delusion at worst: you know that real power lies elsewhere. You dress up like Father Christmas, but only a seriously maladjusted adult would believe they are, indeed, Father Christmas. The cliché of childlike wonder is worse than useless, it is detrimental, since it denies the facts of life. You are a grown-up; you have bills to pay and you will have to go on paying for ever; you know that your imaginary friend is imaginary, because one of your real friends got cancer last year and you can damn well tell the difference.
We can’t bring back enchantment just by telling ourselves that we really, really should do so. All we can achieve that way is to create a manic simulacrum of a state we have lost, and to which we can never return. The magic of childhood is a lost domain, to which the paths are barred.
We have come to a dead end. Enchanted or powerless. A dreamer or a doer. A wild fantasist or a cog in the machine. Which one are you?
You are someone who will find a way out.
*
I closed the Theaetetus filled with a tremendous sense of purpose. I was determined to start out on a journey to the heart of wonder. To storm the castle and take back what is ours!
I started by travelling all the way to the kitchen, where I filled a Moka pot with coffee and put it on the stove. How can you inhabit a world of enchantment when you know that Father Christmas was your dad, that the Mediterranean is a glorified pond, and that crime sometimes does pay?
By talking to those who do it every day.
The expression ‘sense of wonder’ comes from literary criticism: it was first used by science-fiction enthusiasts. One of the main triggers of my lifelong love affair with wonder was reading The Lord of the Rings when I was ten. The beauty of its enchanted woods and the mystery of its ancient ruins remained with me.
The first thing Homo sapiens did, as soon as it was smart enough to do something other than sleep, hunt and copulate, was tell stories. Stories are the way our cultures came to define themselves. They are the cornerstone of philosophy, religion, art and science. If wonder is raw energy, stories are the first shape that energy took – and storytellers were always in the business of shaping wonder.
But stories were not only made of words. Take the Lascaux cave, the prehistoric site in southern France whose walls are decorated with around 6,000 depictions of animals (bulls, horses, stags, big cats and the odd human), drawn some 20,000 years ago. The images are clearly telling us something, and anthropologists and art historians have been theorizing about what that might be ever since the cave was discovered in 1940. Lascaux had no practical function to speak of, and, when you consider how small and vulnerable were the tribes of the Late Stone Age, you could be forgiven for thinking that they had more pressing tasks than walking underground, in the dark, for hours on end, etching figures on a cave wall. And yet that is exactly what they did. But why? Those who took the trouble to create these beautiful paintings must have been driven by motivations more mysterious than the functional depiction of animals slaughtered in the hunt. There is magic at work here. These cave artists were past masters of wonder.
Such people are still among us. Even in our disenchanted age there are people who do things with wonder, as a profession, a calling, or both. Artists, scientists and magicians, to name but three. They could give me important lessons.
Not lessons, I thought. Training.
All of our senses can be trained: we can become better at spotting things, we can develop a musical ear, we can learn to improve our sense of touch, taste and smell.
And we can train our emotions also. We can train ourselves to be calmer, to cope better with heartbreak, to carry on when the going gets tough.
I didn’t see why our sense of wonder should be any different. I could search for wisdom in various different fields, and come up with a training programme, a workout to strengthen our wonder muscles.
I drank my coffee as a potion and returned to my books.
Somewhere on my shelves I had a book about the history of theatrical magic.
*
And so I took the first step on a journey that would bring me to marvellous shores. My aim was to distil the lessons learned along the way into a form of practical wisdom, a new kind of magic with the power to re-enchant our lives: I wasn’t after a temporary fix to help me shake off the blues, I wanted to learn something that would stay with me, something that would strengthen me and help me cope with future crises.
At each step of my journey I tried to clarify, to myself in the first place, what was the lesson. It was like finding keys on a quest. Once I had them all, I would be able to open the doors to a new sense of wonder. I gave a name to each of these keys, and for each key I prepared a workout, a series of practical exercises. The order in which the keys appear is not random: there is a rhyme and a reason to their sequence. I recommend, therefore, that you read the chapters in this book, and do the associated workouts, in the order in which they are presented. There are doors that cannot be unlocked until others have first been opened.
I started with the firm view that wonder is not a zero-sum game, that we can be both accomplished and wide-eyed. I have found ways to embrace both the inevitable weariness of life and its glorious potential for wonder – ways that worked for me and might work for you. I claim no ultimate wisdom, but I have learned a few secrets, and I think you might want to learn them too.
Come on, let me show you.