SpaceX, the seven hundredth launch, and what we did to wonder

Somewhere in the last week or so a rocket went up, and you almost certainly did not notice. I do not mean that as a scold. I did not notice either, not at the time. The company that launched it, SpaceX, recently sent up its seven hundredth Falcon rocket, and the fact reached most of us, if it reached us at all, as a line scrolling past on the way to something else. Seven hundred. A number that would have stopped the world cold within living memory now barely disturbs a Tuesday.

I find this worth sitting with, because it is one of the cleanest examples we have of a very old puzzle. What happens to wonder when the wonderful becomes routine? And is the answer a loss, or is it something we ought to be glad of?

The case that routine ruins everything

Let me put the gloomy view as strongly as I can, because it is not a stupid one. There was a time, and it was not long ago, when a rocket leaving the ground was an event that gathered families around a television. People wept. They remembered where they were. The thing was difficult and rare and therefore charged with meaning, and the difficulty was part of the meaning. To make it ordinary, on this view, is to sand the awe off it. We have not lost the ability to go to space. We have lost the ability to be amazed that we can, and that second loss might be the sadder one. A civilisation that can do marvels and yawn at them has mislaid something it will struggle to find again.

I think anyone honest feels the pull of that. I feel it. And yet I do not believe it is the whole truth.

What the yawn is actually made of

Consider what it takes for a thing to become routine. It has to work, and keep working, so reliably that you can stop holding your breath. The yawn is not contempt. The yawn is trust. We do not marvel every time an aeroplane lands, not because landing is trivial, but because it has been made so dependable that our attention is freed to go elsewhere, to the person waiting at arrivals, to the rest of our lives. The boredom is the achievement wearing plain clothes.

Wonder is what we feel at the edge of our powers. Routine is what a power feels like once it has moved to the centre.

There is a real cost, and the gloomy view is right to name it. But the cost is the price of a genuine good, which is difficulty made ordinary and shared. The rare miracle belongs to the few who witness it. The routine one belongs to everybody, including the people who never look up.

The wonder worth keeping

None of this means we should let the sense of amazement die of neglect, and here I part company with the shruggers as firmly as with the mourners. The task, I think, is to move our wonder rather than to lose it. Not the launch, which has earned its place in the background, but the fact of the background itself. That we are the kind of creature who can take the almost impossible and make it a Tuesday. That is the thing worth stopping for.

So I would offer a small practice, the only kind a philosopher is entitled to recommend. Once in a while, when some marvel scrolls past you disguised as old news, stop for the length of a breath and let it be strange again. Not to manufacture awe, but to notice, honestly, what you have quietly started to take for granted. The seven hundredth rocket is not less astonishing than the first. We have simply grown, which is its own kind of astonishing, into people who can bear it.