We summon you, o Muse! With eyes closed let us commune with that divine power which is nothing but a flash of lightning caught at midnight between thought and language…

Wonder, an experience of the extraordinary, cannot be repeated without dying—dying in a sense more final than biological extinction. To live is to die, says Seneca: every sunrise comes at the price of a previous sunset, each moment of beauty carries with it the cost of loss and grief. There is nothing we love so much as that which cannot last—nor is there anything more terrifying. But the sense of wonder that elevates us to a state of being transcendent also renders us unable to hold on to time. To dwell in the wonder is to surrender to an inevitable transition into spectacle: the ordinary. The moment of singular transcendence that births a sense of wonder also condemns us to experience that moment only once. Its inability to be repeated is its greatest beauty, and yet, the essence of wonder is also the essence of its mortality—in being able to exist only as a unique singular event it precludes the very possibility of a kaligenetic afterlife.

Unlike beauty, which can be preserved by means of mnemotechnics and mechanical reproduction, wonder cannot be recorded—and thus it cannot survive kaligenesis. Wonder cannot be contained, and yet the essence of the human condition lies in our insatiable desire to do so. As Friedrich Nietzsche remarked in Human, All Too Human, we live not for our own sake, but for the sake of those that come after us, for what good are the spectacles if there’s nobody around to watch them? What good is all the laughter in a room if nobody’s listening? It is in this paradoxical predicament—the irrevocable urge to preserve and communicate combined with our inability to hold on to any particular moment, sensation or experience—that wonder comes to die at its own hand.

We want the transcendence of wonder without the death—and we get it only in a fleeting glimpse that fades even before we know what it is we want. Wonder, if it is to have a place in a culture that has no room for anything but spectacle, must sacrifice its essence on the altar of reproduction. Its ability to generate meaning is thus necessarily also the condition of its death. Each act of repetition transforms it further into a commodified spectacle, reducing it to a sensualized thing that one has possession of, or an act that one performs at will—but this very repetitiousness, this very accessibility that allows it to thrive is at the same time what kills wonder in the long run. The more we see something the more it becomes insignificant through sheer presence; a spectacle can only survive as a new, a sudden, or a unique occurrence, which is why one can never see it too many times. The more often a spectacle occurs, the less its effect. Wonder and spectacle are stages of a single process; wonder is only wonder at its birth, at its beginning, at its unique and singular emergence into the light of human consciousness—beyond that, as its spurious life goes on, it ineluctably evolves into spectacle. It is this dynamic—not a static equation between opposites—that gives wonder its power and its tragedy. The more wonderful something is, the sooner it becomes un-wonderful: wonder operates under a kaligenetic spiral of its own, accelerating through an increasingly rapid process of degeneration that drives it toward spectacle.

Wonder requires difficulty to thrive on, but difficulty alone isn’t enough to keep it alive—for no matter how difficult something is, repetition will reduce it to spectacle, if it has not done so already. What gives wonder the potential to last is not difficulty in and of itself, but difficulty combined with significance. Wonder cannot be willed—nor can it be commodified, since it exists only through encounters that are irreplaceable, unique, and indivisible, like those who die suddenly without knowing why. This is the sense of transcendence that the American psychologist James Hillman defines as enthousiasmos—in which the subject experiences being taken, captured, or gripped by the world in which he lives. When something has this power it is also endowed with significance. The word significance is often misconstrued in everyday language to mean the amount of information something carries or the number of different uses to which it can be put—but it has nothing to do with either information or utility. Something has significance when it can be said of it, “I exist only because of that,” and it is through such significance that wonder survives repetition. The more something is used the less meaningful it becomes. Significance cannot be commodified because it is a quality of transcendence—of being taken, gripped, captured—and thus it belongs only to moments of being. Significance is the power of transcendent moments to hold us, but the power to hold comes at the price of accessibility—and in the kaligenetic spiral this accessibility that limits significance becomes a driving force for increasing repetition, which in turn necessitates an even greater loss of meaning through commodification and degradation.

This dialectical spiral—of increased accessibility combined with decreased significance, each reinforcing the other—is what eventually turns every wonderful event into an un-wonderful spectacle, even when the original wonder was so intense and unique that it could never be repeated. As something becomes more available, accessible and familiar to us it becomes less able to transform our lives; and at the same time its diminished presence makes us want more of it, to use it at will—and so the spiral tightens, drawing ever nearer to a singularity that will either explode it or turn it into a cold empty space. Wonder must thus constantly strive to remain elusive—and if it ever thinks it has succeeded in making itself perfectly intelligible then it is doomed. But wonder, in being unable to hold on to time, cannot be conscious of any strategy, even of this one, and so it finds itself condemned by its own nature to be driven further and further into the kaligenetic afterlife that will inevitably take it from transcendence to commodification, from enchantment to boredom, from enthousiasmos to a mere thrill. It can neither see the danger that threatens it, nor protect itself from it—and if it knew, it could not even cry.

Given the inevitable trajectory that all transcendence follows when exposed to human desire to possess and reproduce it, one could almost be tempted to call it cynical to propose, as Friedrich Schlegel does, that everything worthwhile ought to be made difficult and impossible. Anything that becomes too easy will lose its value. And yet this seems to me to be precisely the lesson that wonder teaches us: if it were easy to find what we need, or to attain it by some mechanical procedure, then we would lose not only the transcendent value of what we found or attained, but also the value of the journey. But this is precisely why we will always lose the sense of wonder when we seek to reproduce it; the very desire for reproduction and the mechanical processes required for its fulfillment inevitably corrupt it by destroying its originality and uniqueness—and what survives this death is only the meaningless corpse of what it was. To keep the transcendent value of what we attain we have to make sure it cannot be repeated: we have to ensure that it can be reached only by one very specific and unrepeatable path, and we must make the attainment itself so difficult that we can never will it for its own sake—not in order to possess it, but to keep the transcendence alive through the difficulty that will deny us any sense of triumph. It is by making what we find unfindable that we give it meaning and depth; and it is in this same way that we must try to preserve what we call “wonder”: by destroying any possibility of repetition—and it is in this destruction that “wonder” will die.

Wonder is not an end, it is the means by which you become sensitive to what is miraculous—as Seneca says in Letters from a Stoic, and this is perhaps the most useful way in which to understand what I mean by the death of wonder. For in order to experience its meaning we have to accept the fact of its mortality—it cannot live for itself, it must sacrifice itself in order to make the journey meaningful; the destination is only important insofar as it cannot be reached except by traveling through the difficult terrain in which the transcendence is present. In other words: it is in accepting the fact of its death that “wonder” finds the possibility of meaning and transcendence—and in doing so it sacrifices itself. If we try to keep “wonder” alive it will betray its own essence and become something insipid, false and repellent, for its meaning is intrinsically linked to its death—just as all our desires and wishes, and the deepest needs of our heart, are rooted in pain.

Our longing for the extraordinary, for the miraculous, comes to us as a way of enduring the mundaneness, the tedium, of the everyday. If everything was miraculous it would not be; if everything was beautiful it would not be—for what makes the miraculous or the beautiful valuable is not that they themselves are present everywhere, but that they are not. Only that which is difficult to find is worth seeking; the mere satisfaction of desire turns into a meaningless pleasure. This is what Seneca is saying in On Anger when he remarks that it is the imperishable quality of the universe that makes it precious; the fact that we can never attain it or possess it forever gives it value—which is why anger and any form of selfishness, which involve an insatiable craving and desire for something to remain unchanged, are a kind of suicide. In the same way, the true meaning and transcendence of what we call “wonder” cannot survive its death, for only in and through this death does it become miraculous.