Wonder and temperament

[eve_prime]

I've been typing up notes from R.W. Hepburn's essay on wonder, and this part about individual predispositions towards framing their experiences is worth sharing:

“Temperamentally, individuals find certain of the options specially compelling: but the responses are also modifiable by reflection. For instance, it can be argued that ironical and sardonic attitudes, when they predominate, tend regrettably to shield or mask a person from experiences of certain types of value, including high values which (once acknowledged) would evoke awe or humility. Again, a response of dread at the human predicament keeps the prospect of our individual death before us, anticipates it, as it were, and so gives the ‘dreadful’ a gratuitously debilitating hold over life as a whole.”