Rendering this complexity alive on the page requires an ear attuned to the balance between certainty and uncertainty that wonder demands. A literary work that has wonder as its occasion or subject must have some degrees of mimetic ambition; it must succeed at enactment rather than summation. Put plainly: explaining the conditions for one’s own experience of wonder rarely succeeds at inspiring second-hand wonder in the reader. It’s the craft of literary wonder that interests me, and it’s one I maintain, for which where exists no tidy rubric, whose principles can only be worked out by looking at examples of literary works that do succeed at suggesting in language something just beyond articulation, whose gestures intimate the pleasing breach of present knowing into timeless unknowing.