A book review on the last day of 2024 in the Wall Street Journal has a wonderful and surprising final paragraph. The reviewer is Maxwell Carter, who is vice chairman of 20th- and 21st-century art at Christie’s in New York, and the book is The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: An Extraordinary New Journey through History’s Greatest Treasures, by Bettany Hughes. After describing each of these wonders, Carter concludes:
As dazzling as these seven “burning expressions of will and hope” may be, they are defined by man’s limitations and outshone by numberless, and often nameless, wonders of nature. “I have never heard of this spot before,” remarks the young hunter Oliver Edwards in James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Pioneers” (1823). “It is not mentioned in the books.” “I have never read a book in my life,” Cooper’s hero, Natty Bumppo, replies tersely. “And how should a man who has lived in towns and schools know any thing about the wonders of the woods!”
Wow. Dig that first sentence in particular. And of course he’s right, and of course we know the Creator of those greater wonders, do we not?