Vasquez’s whoa is what is known as a vocal burst, a pattern of sound that lasts a quarter of a second or so, doesn’t involve words, and is intended to convey emotion. Other examples of vocal bursts include sighs, laughs, shrieks, growls, blechs, oohs, aahs, and mmms. Vocal bursts are millions of years old and were a primary language of Homo sapiens prior to the emergence of words some 100,000 years ago. Many social mammals, including great apes, horses, goats, dogs, elephants, and bats, have repertoires of vocal bursts by which they communicate about threat, food, sex, affiliation, comfort, pain, and play.
To understand whether awe’s whoas are universal, we had people vocalize their feelings associated with different situations, such as: “You’ve stubbed your toe on a large rock and feel pain.” Ouch! Or “You see someone who is physically attractive and want to have sex.” Mmm (very similar to the sound we make when tasting delicious food). Or “You have just seen the largest waterfall in the world.” The vocal bursts of awe sounded like whoa or aaaah or wow. When we played these sounds to people from ten countries, they correctly identified vocal bursts of awe nearly 90 percent of the time. This finding struck us: the vocal burst of awe is the most universal sound of emotion, and readily recognized by people in a remote village in the Himalayas of eastern Bhutan, whose residents had minimal contact with Western missionaries or expressive media from the West and from India. Before the emergence of language some 100,000 years ago, we were saying whoa to our kith and kin to join together in facing the vast mysteries of life.
Awe and Culture Evolving
In our tour of the why of awe, we have journeyed back in evolutionary time to imagine an early hominid profile of awe involving tears, piloerection, huddling, sounds like whoa, widened eyes, open arms and hands, and other social behaviors, such as touch. This was the awe, we can imagine, of perhaps ten thousand Homo sapiens a couple hundred thousand years ago, which brought them together to unite in food sharing, huddling when cold, scaring off predators, and hunting large mammals—tasks required for our hypersocial survival, and in relation to patterns in weather, ecosystems, life cycles of flora and fauna, and migrations of animals. These early forms of awe were about joining together to face peril and the unknown.
Some 80,000 to 100,000 years ago, the archaeological record reveals, language, symbols, music, and visual art emerged. Homo sapiens became a cultural primate and would quickly archive awe with our ever-evolving symbolic capacities. With the emergence of language-based representation, we began to describe the wonders of life to others, using words, metaphors, stories, legends, and myths, and with visual techniques in paintings, carvings, masks, and figurines. Through symbolization, we dramatized our bodily expressions of awe in singing, chanting, dance, dramatic performance, and music. And through ritualization, we formalized the patterns of awe-related bodily tendencies, for example bowing and touching, into rituals and ceremonies.
In archiving awe in myriad cultural forms, we joined with others in cultural and aesthetic experiences of awe to understand the mysteries of our very social living. This was the thesis offered by Robert Hass, the U.S. poet laureate from 1995 to 1997, in a twelve-minute tour of the role of awe in literature and poetry at a conference in Berkeley in 2016. As he detailed this idea, he embodied literary epiphanies with whoas, our ancient sounds of recognizing the sublime.
Hass began with a riff on Aristotle’s idea of catharsis. Twenty-five hundred years ago, catharsis was a purifying rituaclass="underline" a person would wash themselves with oils prior to entering the home if they had encountered dangerous spirits. Drama, poetry, and literature, which allow us in the safe realm of the imagination to wonder and gain insight into human horrors, can serve as symbolic, ritualized acts of cleansing—transforming human harm and horror into aesthetic representations that stir awe.
Hass then moved on to Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex: A king sleeps with his mother, kills his father, and then gouges out his own eyes. At the play’s end the chorus sings of being cursed with such knowledge about the horrifying conflicts that can ruin families. Turning to the audience, Hass raised his eyebrows and leaned in:
WHOA.
Hass then fast-forwarded two thousand years to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra, both ending in scenes of horrifying death. At the end of Antony and Cleopatra, “the earth cracks and shivers at its core.” Cleopatra’s death is so powerful it gives chills to the earth! Noting this, Hass lifted his gaze from his notes and looked out to the audience:
WHOA.
Audience members startled. Laughing and nudging friends, they wondered where Hass’s tour would take them next, and then shifted their attention back to the podium.
There Hass turned to a lifelong source of awe for him: haiku. It is customary for haiku poets to write one poem about Mount Fuji, a sacred place of awe for more than two thousand spiritual communities in Japan. He quoted the legendary poet Bashō.
In the misty rain
Mount Fuji is veiled all day—
how intriguing!
WHOA.
And then this haiku about a neighbor the poet lives near:
Autumn deepens—
the man next door, what does he do
for a living?
WHOA.
We can find everyday awe in wondering about other people’s minds and the patterns of their lives.
At about the eighth minute of this brief history of literary awe, Hass landed in the words of Emily Dickinson—“one of the greatest writers in the language,” he observed. Her poems come out of a state of low blood sugar, Hass joked. They reflect her efforts at grappling with the yearning to connect with infinity in the nineteenth century, as the “big daddy” God was fading. He notes her abiding interest in death and grief.
He read:
There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons —
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes —
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us —
We can find no scar,
But internal difference —
Where the Meanings, are —
None may teach it — Any —
’Tis the seal Despair —
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air —
When it comes, the Landscape listens —
Shadows — hold their breath —
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death —
In hearing “certain slant of light” and “the Landscape listens” and “look of Death,” my heart paused and my eyes teared up slightly, accompanied by a faint rush of chills up my spine. I understood in my body the vastness of loss, leaning in with other audience members in a shared awareness of this fundamental truth. And then heard Hass again: