Wonder, like lightning, strikes in a way that illuminates. It can destroy the suffocating numbness that can kill the spirit as it dulls the senses. It can even strike so deep that the old way of being in the world is incinerated, allowing a new person to rise from its ashes.

True wonder inspires a heart-thumping awe, not a warm fuzzy awww. Lest we forget the nature of who we are, the cosmos we inhabit, and by whose hand it came into being…

For the title, the image of lightning hitting New York City, and for the ghost of a building in the clouds, Brian Selznick’s Wonder Struck is well worth reading and beholding. The inside is every good as the cover.

[New York: Scholastic Press, 2011[)