What We Look for When We Are Looking: John Steinbeck on Wonder and the Relational Nature of the Universe

Searching for “that principle which keys us deeply into the pattern of all life.”

“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will,” Baudelaire wrote — something Newton embodied in looking back on his life of revolutionary discoveries, only to see himself appearing “like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” What we are real...