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The author is doing several things here which might bother you. Among them is mixing the meaning of "enchantment" with the meaning of "wonderment." He begins the article by defining enchantment as "magic, mystery, animate spirits, or other non-human forces and agents" but through the whole body of the article only treats it as a sense of wonderment, which is not the same thing. You are right to be irritated by this. Another thing he is doing is repeatedly asserting the enchanting qualities of the world without ever addressing why these things are enchanting, with the implication that the why isn't worth addressing or maybe isn't possible to know, when it is obvious. In most of his examples, the reason is because we are naturally reductive and reduce complex phenomena to much simpler mental models. Then when we look closer, we marvel at the far more complex reality. The author behaves as if this is some sort of deep mystery of the universe.


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