A Sense of Wonder is a movie made from a drama which is really a monologue by Rachel Carson [an actress playing her very well indeed] during the last year of her life. The film was shot at her house in Maine and at her home in Silver Springs, Maryland. It was a moving, meditative piece. The sound track was only birdsong and the adagio movement of Beethoven's ethereal Violin concerto, one of Carson's [and my] favorite pieces of music.This was shown in the documentary film class I'm taking. It was preceded by a boringly didactic little filmed lecture about "stuff" from an ecological point of view. Both were preaching to the converted; the discussion afterwards was simply a lot of statements about what we all know about global warming, Carson's success and the miserable state of the world today. Even the Gaia theory was espoused by a woman I had thought was a sensible soul. Actually I understand the appeal of the Gaia theory but I do not see, as this woman did, that events like earthquakes, tsunami, avalanches prove it -- we happen to know more about how many catastrophies are happening because of the relentless news media which loves disasters of all kinds. I certainly see the world as one large system but not as one with intent or purpose.
As I just read in a Scientific American magazine this morning, [and have often read] we have a brain that makes patterns, it has contributed greatly to our survival but we also make mad, runaway patterns, seeing purpose in the sets of events and conspiracies in coincidences and comforting intent in serendipitous instances. I was happy to hear a room full of my contemporaries who are fairly well informed about these matters. I'm afraid, like me, they are incompletely informed and are a little too complacent about their being "are of the solution" when they refuse to buy water in plastic throw away bottles.
