This book is about wonder. Not wonder as a romantic notion or a vague synonym for enthusiasm. Not wonder as a professional skill or a competitive advantage. But wonder as a specific cognitive and emotional state, a state of being genuinely, actively, productively engaged with what one does not yet know, that is the source of everything most distinctively human about us. Our art, our love, our moral seriousness, our willingness to face our own deaths with something other than denial, all of it begins in wonder. All of it requires, for its sustenance, a particular relationship to not-knowing that is the opposite of what the culture of immediate answers encourages.

Curiosity is the itch, wonder is the condition of the skin. Curiosity wants to be scratched. Wonder is content, for long periods, to simply remain in contact with the thing that occasions it, the unresolved question, the anomalous fact, the beauty that exceeds any available explanation. Wonder does not require resolution. It requires only presence, the specific, alert, receptive presence of a mind that has decided, for now, not to reach for the nearest answer.

We are the animal that wonders. That is not a limitation. It is the description of what makes us most fully ourselves. And in an age that has automated almost every other distinctively human capacity, wonder, the specific, vulnerable, irreplaceable experience of being genuinely not-sure and genuinely engaged, is the last territory that is entirely ours.

This book is an argument for protecting it.