Josef Pieper explains how our modern world has suppressed the sense of wonder and marvelousness that should be part of our spiritual, cultural and intellectual life. He writes:
“Wonder does not occur in the workaday world…and in a totalitarian world of work every form of and manner of transcendence is bound to wither, (would perish, indeed, if human nature could be destroyed or altered entirely); for where the religious spirit is not tolerated, where there is no room for poetry and art, where love and death are robbed of all significant effect and reduced to the level of banality, philosophy will never prosper.”
Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, (New York: The New American Library, 1963), 74.