Feeding on wonder and keeping one’s self in clouds doesn’t necessarily sound bad. It sounds rather dreamy certainly. It makes me think of Elfine in Cold Comfort Farm who periodically drifts through the woods spouting poetry. I have some sympathy for this romantic impulse for the desire to eat awe, to float, to never touch the ground.
But of course in this case, the wonder is not at the beauties and majesties of nature and the clouds are not likely the white puffy kind that angels like to play on. But it’s interesting that Claudius has chosen these words with their usually positive connotations to describe something that he definitely does not think is good. The sentence has a rather beautiful quality of starting in this light, airy place and slowly descending through buzzers to infect to pestilent and ending on death.
