Wonder and Exile in the New World

Introduction

Few things enchant the human mind more than tales of travel to faraway lands. Such stories can carry us away and take us to places that are barely imaginable, places that are beyond the borders of what our mind conceives as possible or logical. There is, for this reason, something delightful and wondrous in travel narratives. Perhaps they delight us for giving verbal expression to the infinite impulse and restless craving that make human beings set out in quest of knowledge or wisdom, beauty or love, or else something more indefinable and mysterious. Or perhaps it is for their daring , their willingness to confront danger and trespass familiar limits in the search for some unheard of, fantastic truth that causes us to admire and delight in these stories. Herman Melville, for one, likened the tall tales born from such expeditions to the pleasure of sinning because they were equally seductive and indulgent, wild and romantic. They were sinful for exciting and swelling that dangerous appetite—curiosity (too frequently the path introduction Were this world an endless plain, and by sailing eastward we could forever reach new distances, and discover sights more sweet and strange than any Cyclades or Islands of King Solomon, then there were promise in the voyage. But in pursuit of those far mysteries we dream of, or in tormented chase of that demon phantom that, some time or other, swims before all human hearts; while chasing such over this round globe, they either lead us on in barren mazes or midway leave us whelmed. —Herman Melville, Moby Dick to heresy in the Middle Ages). And they were sinfully delightful in their capacity to stimulate our deepest urges and propel us into new worlds of possibility. Something like this must have happened to the explorers of the New World, as if sirens cried out to them in an enchanting and curious voice that they could not resist. In flirting with the novelty of a once unknown continent, they would gradually revise older fears of curiosity and transform these fears into noble possibilities for discovery. The modern world would be made of such principles and the Americas, in particular, played an important role in this revolution in values. With the frequency of wonder at a particularly high pitch, the travelers to the Americas would rhapsodize and improvise in trying to name and identify their discoveries. Their preoccupation with wonder was a motif unmistakably related to their efforts to invent a whole new worldview that would capture the sounds and flavors of an American landscape. The language of wonder would come to represent a defining feature of its cultures, literatures and religions. At the outset of my own story in this book—a book about the distant mysteries that the New World represented—it is important for me to provide a brief map of the journey, lest the reader end up lost in a barren maze as Melville warned. So, let me begin by saying something about the ambiguity and perplexity of this thing called “wonder.” At the very least, there are a few entrances to the labyrinths of wonder. For one, the experience of wonder can suggest something pleasurable and attractive, something that can ravish and intoxicate. In this sense, when we are faced with something wondrous, we are stimulated by a beauty or good so inviting and charming that we want to revel and lose ourselves in it. Though wonder represents what the mind cannot fully know or understand—for being so novel and startling to our normative conceptions of knowledge—this very intractability and inscrutability makes it all the more seductive, all the more intriguing . It stimulates curiosity and beckons us to explore its hidden mysteries. Curiosity, as I have suggested, is an element of this hunger for the unknown , the itch of the human heart for exploration and adventure, for movement into strange and exotic regions of human knowledge. Wonder and curiosity are manifestations of the soul hunger that drove Melville’s Ishmael to take to a whaling ship. And it was a similar torment, even before this American wonderer, that brought the ever-expanding mass of European explorers to the unknown shores of the New World. If this glimpse of wonder’s alluring and radiant beauty—the gush of life—is the most pleasing, it is not the only one. We all know that the feast  L wonder and exile in the new world [18.217.83.97] Project MUSE (2024...