Point of View: Here to Wonder

Before the Mexicans build a wall to keep us out, Mary and I are seizing the opportunity to visit Zihuatenejo once more — only for a week, but it promises to be restorative. 

There’s so much that needs restoring at our ages that maybe it’s meaningless to talk of a place as being restorative, but anyway. Her late mother, whose ashes we’ll scatter there, in the unruly Pacific, and her older sister discovered Zihuatenejo and the Las Brisas hotel nearby years ago, and then we came, and we loved it too.

We plop under palapas and read and read and read and reflect and reflect and yes there are the margaritas, one so good once that I credited it with transcendental properties, though Mary said I shouldn’t have been so astonished given the fact that I’d drunk hers also.

I’ve read Seneca there and Shakespeare, though I’ll probably take Richard Fortey’s “Life: An Unauthorised Biography” with me this time. I’ve made it to the Devonian thus far, when we began creeping up onto the land. I’ve got about 360 million years to go. It’s fitting that I take his evolutionary history there for time stretches out there for us about as far as it can. 

To compartmentalize time so, as we do, is to trivialize it, Richard Fortey says.

Chapter II begins, “The earth was born from debris that circled the nascent Sun. . . .” I’ll not go on; you know the rest.

Goethe is quoted on the front cover as having said, “I am here to wonder.” And I find I am more and more in a state of wonder the longer I live. Henry Louis Gates’s genealogical researches fascinate me, Commander Kelly’s year in space fascinates me, the squirrels chasing each other up and down and around the trees fascinate me, penguins fascinate me, resilience fascinates me, and inspires me, and moments in millennia, such as this one on which we are about to embark.