When I was young, a tantalizing haze
of mystery hovered over foreign land.
No Google map or Wiki-on-demand
minute precision amplified my gaze.
A magazine bejeweled with Kodachrome
might testify of some exotic place,
but lacking tools condensing time and space,
imagination took me far from home.
What difference now. In lurid detail each
antipodean city street, hotel,
museum, restaurant, shop, and wishing well
(all with reviews!) is instantly in reach.
Much ignorance is certainly a curse,
but wonder is its blessing in reverse.
—David Jackson Lohnes
2022
Notes:
Bliss – Reference to the common expression “Ignorance is bliss.”
This sonnet has a blend of Petrarchan and Shakespearean features: three developing quatrains with a summarizing couplet, but the sense falls into an octave and a sestet, and the quatrains follow an ABBA scheme.
tantalizing haze – When I was about ten my dad gave me a book that he had had as a kid, Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels, a compendium of stories and photos about notable places past and present, from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Pyramids. It provoked a life-long fascination with marvelous places, and I treasure it still.
Google Map – I first encountered Google Earth in the mid-2000s as a software program you had to download and install on your computer. The ability to instantly call satellite imagery of any place on the planet blew my mind. It felt like gaining the power of an Olympian deity.
Wiki-on-demand – Wikipedia has utterly transformed my access to knowledge about faraway places and every other topic.
A magazine – National Geographic, by far my favorite periodical all throughout childhood and teen years. Any random issue I came across I snapped up with glee.
Kodachrome – Kodak’s premier camera film, known for its ability to capture and preserve color without fading for decades. Many National Geographic photographers used it.
antipodean – Now used informally to refer specifically Australia and New Zealand, but originally a more general term for the land on the opposite side of the earth, the place where all the feet are upside down from yours.
wishing well – Not every city has a wishing well of course, but there’s always some small, out-of-the-way sight that’s a source of local pride and tourist attention. Sometimes the constraints of rhyme cause me to wrestle fiercely; this was one such place. I was very happy with the sense and direction of the quatrain as a whole and with certain of the words and didn’t want to disrupt it. And I liked the contract between the sharp A rhymes (each/reach) and the liquid B rhymes (hotel/well).
wonder is its blessing – I believe that human populations need wonder to stay mentally and emotionally healthy. If there’s no uncertainty, no mystery, no awe, then we become like zoo animals living in a cage we’ve fully explored again and again. One of my concerns with our increasing access to instant knowledge and amazing powers is the concomitant loss of opportunities to be amazed.