Bewilderment

Bewilderment to me means the lack of knowledge or certainty which leads to curiosity and new ideas. To not understand something but to go above and beyond to find out what it means because it's intriguing to you. I think Edward Abbey in The Serpents of Paradise, did an excellent job of showing us the audience the desire he had with the gopher snakes with the intense details and interest he took in them. His perception of the snakes makes the reader feel like we are there with him and we can picture the snakes doing their dance and him being down on the ground with the snakes. Even as his job being a park ranger, he doesn't know everything about all the animals but he knows he should stay away from them but he can't. That what bewilderment is, the curiosity of not understanding something that just leaves you in Awe. We need bewilderment in our lives because it makes us find the answers to our problems. If we always knew everything then we wouldn't constantly be learning and finding out new things. Furthermore, in Bewilderment by Fanny Howe, this complex essay really makes you think of how bewilderment is in everything whether it be politics, poetics, nature, language etc... He manages to bring anything and everything into the concept of bewilderment. He uses phrases or words such as "sudden confrontation" (5), "unlocatable and hidden" (6), and "bewilderment is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability" (15) that gives us more or less what bewilderment is to him. Howe is pretty spot on about his definition of bewilderment and how he connects it to stories, poems and politics. I think certainty is necessary is our lives because something things need to be known and we need to be certain of like the president, the color of the sky or our age. Having no knowledge of ourselves or information would result in us always being lost and never found. If we aren't certain of some things then we would be a disoriented society.