Life & Wisdom Quote by A. R. Ammons

Ammons is smuggling an ethic of attention into a sentence that sounds almost like a casual pep talk. The trick is the word "closely": not "positively", not "romantically", not "with gratitude", but with the sustained, almost scientific patience of a poet who trusts that perception itself can change the world you think you live in. "Anything" is the dare. It rejects the curated, Instagrammable version of wonder and argues that the raw materials for astonishment are everywhere, including the stuff we usually file under boring, ugly, or beneath us.

The subtext is quietly defiant against modern speed. Close looking takes time; it also takes humility, because to look closely is to admit you didn't really see it the first time. Ammons spent a career making epics out of ordinary phenomena - walks, weather, the minute churn of natural processes - and this line reads like a distilled manifesto for that project. Wonder, here, isn't a gift bestowed by rare objects; it's a byproduct of method. Change the scale, and the mundane becomes intricate; change the duration, and the overlooked becomes alive.

There's also a moral edge. If anything can become wonderful under scrutiny, then contempt is often a failure of attention, not an accurate judgment. Ammons doesn't promise that everything is good. He suggests something slipperier: that reality, examined without hurry, is stranger, richer, and harder to dismiss than our first impressions allow.