‘‘Who doesn’t want to retire to Florida?’’ Frisco said with a big smile during the preshow in New Orleans. We were talking about the elephants’ retirement, and his family’s move. His father would also work at the Florida preserve. When I suggested that this was maybe a happy decision, he said he was a circus person; all the elephant people are. You can rarely see an Asian elephant at the zoo anymore, and when you do, it’s far away. Now where would people be able to see the elephants? Now where would he get the joy of seeing people’s eyes light up when they were close enough to touch the beasts?

So you’re sad, I said to him. He looked down at the ground, and when he looked up, his smile was gone. ‘‘Everyone is sad,’’ he said.

It is an amazing thing to see someone fly through the air, but it’s harder to convey that fact to people who believe they are watching people fly through the air on-screen all the time. You can’t convince children who watch shows with talking animals that it is an incredible thing just to see an elephant play ball with another elephant, or to see a tiger simply not eat his trainer.

It’s getting harder to convince adults, too. Somehow, over the past few decades, we’ve forgotten how to be impressed by physical achievements, incredible feats that no normal person can do. We have forgotten how to prize an act in which a performer risks his life gracefully — to understand that it is both the risk and the grace that make it something truly astonishing. Nowadays, you go to Times Square, and you don’t see people juggling and eating fire and doing delightful busking; you see people in superhero and Elmo costumes doing nothing but existing off versions of something that appears in movies, on TVs and in toy stores. That’s the commercial reality that the Felds have diversified into via their other live shows, like Marvel Universe Live! and Disney on Ice.

The circus is the last bulwark against all that. Which is why the Felds are driven to demonstrate, once again, what is magical and singular about it. Maybe they don’t have their new light bulb yet, but they already have a lot to work with. At the circus, you can see Gemma be shot out of a cannon, which almost always makes children stop eating their popcorn and turn to their parents to ask if they really just saw what they think they saw. You can see clowns, the needy, needy clowns, who look you in the eye to make sure you registered every single strange thing that just happened — a dance, a pratfall, a misunderstanding with the other clowns. You can see ecstatic women drop from the ceiling in Plexiglas globes that just dangle there, and Paulo, who descends on a rope, only to ascend back up with a jetpack. You can watch a league of Chinese men in unitards juggle fire, and a group of women dressed in gold minidresses who ride golden bicycles in artful formation. You can see all these breathtaking feats that — even in a culture that’s all about constant distraction these days — are hard to look away from.

And here’s something else I saw: After the trapeze act was over at a show in Newark, a 10-year-old girl next to me began to sob. When her parents asked her why she was crying, she looked up and shook her head hopelessly and said she couldn’t say.