The Eternal Wonder Read Online Free PDF

mean?”
    “It means liking to use your brain.”
    “What is brain?”
    “It’s your thinking machine—what you have in here.”
    She tapped his skull lightly with her gold-thimbled finger. She was sewing a button on his father’s shirt.
    “I have a brain in there?” he asked.
    “You most certainly have—so that it almost scares me sometimes.”
    “Why does it scare you?”
    “Oh, because—you’re only a little boy not four years old yet.”
    “What does my brain look like, Mama?”
    “Like everyone’s, I guess—a wrinkly gray something.”
    “Then why does it scare you?”
    “You do ask such questions—” She broke off.
    “But I have to ask you, Mama. If I don’t ask, I won’t know.”
    “You could look in the dictionary.”
    “Where is it, Mama?”
    She put down her sewing then and led him to the library and to a big book open on a small table and showed him how to find words.
    “‘Intellectual,’ for example—it begins with an i , doesn’t it, and here are all the i words but you have to see what the next letter is— ia, ib, ic —until you get to in —”
    He listened and looked, absorbed and fascinated. This big book, then, was the source of all words! He had the key, he knew the principle!
    “I won’t ever need to ask you again, Mama. I know now, all by myself.”
    HE LIVED IN A SMALL TOWN , busy with people much older than he. It was a college town and his father taught every day except Saturday and Sunday. On Sunday in the morning he went to church with his parents. At first when he was small, for he did not consider himself small now that he was nearly four years old, his birthday less than a week away, he had been left in the basement in the church nursery. This had not lasted long. He had soon looked at all the picture books, had solved all the puzzles, and had successfully intimidated all the children by appearing much their senior. He was large for his age and he assumed the other children were babies. He was humiliated by being left with them, he thought their prattle absurd, and after two Sundays he asked to be allowed to sit upstairs in the church with the adults.
    His father was doubtful and looked at his mother, questioning.
    “Can he sit still, do you think?”
    “I will sit still,” he replied quickly.
    “Let’s give him a try. He doesn’t like it downstairs,” his mother said.
    He did not really like it upstairs, either, but remembering his promise, he kept it. Inside his skull his brain busied itself by instinct. Not for a moment could it be idle. He pondered the words of the minister, ignoring sometimes their implication and considering instead their sound, their spelling, their meaning. His relentless memory imprisoned any word that was new and when he went home he consulted his constant companion, the dictionary. There were times when the dictionary failed him, nevertheless, and then he was compelled to resort to his mother, since it was intolerable not to know.
    “Mama, what does ‘virgin’ mean?”
    His mother looked up, surprised, from something she was stirring in a bowl on the kitchen table. She hesitated. “Why, I suppose it means not married.”
    “But Mama, Mary was married. She was married to Joseph. The minister said so.”
    “Oh, that—I suppose no one quite understands that. Jesus was born of what’s called the Immaculate Conception.”
    He went away with two new words. Finding them far apart in the dictionary, he tried putting them together. They made no sense. He copied them in the capital letters, as yet his only way of writing, and returned to his mother in the kitchen. She had finished her stirring, she was washing bowl and spoon, and a delicious scent of baking cake pervaded the atmosphere. He showed her the printed words and made complaint.
    “Mama, I still don’t understand.”
    She shook her head. “I can’t explain it to you, son. I don’t really understand it myself.”
    “Then how can I know, Mama?”
    “Ask your father