WHOA.
And then to finish, a poem by Gary Snyder. Sitting near a small fire in the Sierras, Snyder draws connections between the fire warming his body, the volcanic fires that created the mountain he was near, and Buddhist fire rituals that purify the soul. Hass ends with a saying of the Buddha:
We are all burning.
WHOA.
Hass’s whoas and the poetic words he read stirred audience members to open their minds, to wonder about our moral failings, death, our connections to neighbors and the mysterious operations of their minds, the meanings of light and cathedral tunes, and how fire creates mountains and granite and, metaphorically, our souls. Literature, drama, essay, and poetry join us in the experience of awe and allow us to benefit from its transformations. In one test of this idea, students were first presented with this question: “Why are we alive?” They then wrote a poem to capture their thinking and reported upon the awe they felt while writing. The poems were then rated by PhD students of literature for how sublime they were according to these criteria that date back to ancient Greece:
Did the poem have boldness and grandeur of thoughts?
Did it raise passions to a violent or enthusiastic degree?
Did it show skillful use of language? Graceful expression?
Did it reveal elegant structure and composition?
Another group of participants then read the poems and reported on how much they were inspired by their words. The critical finding: the more student poets felt awe in writing their poems, the more those poems were judged as sublime by the PhD students; and the more sublime the poem, the more inspiration student readers felt. We can transform experiences of awe into shared aesthetic experiences that unite us into something larger than the self.
This archiving of awe, of translating the body of awe into a cultural form, was part of how Claire Tolan would make her way in Berlin. She transformed her sensations of ASMR into creative acts of twenty-first-century culture. She hosted a show on Berlin community radio featuring live ASMR collages. With a fellow artist, she hosted social events in Berlin nightclubs that involved ASMR karaoke, where participants whispered songs and audience members whispered for encores.
WHOA.
Awe and culture are always evolving. Several thousand years ago, it was a time of everyday awe. Indigenous peoples found awe in relation to nature, stories, ceremony, dance, chanting, song, visual design, and in states of consciousness beyond our ordinary ideas about space, time, and causality. Lao Tzu would orient a continent to the mysteries of a life force, Tao, in nature. Plato would declare that wonder is the source of philosophy, and the means by which we answer life’s great questions, including those that have concerned us here: What is our soul? How do we find what is sacred to us?
Twenty-five hundred years ago, accounts of mystical experiences, like those of Julian of Norwich, begin to dominate the written history of awe, from the Buddha and Christ until the Age of Enlightenment. This archiving of mystical awe in legends, myths, teachings, ceremonies, iconography, and temples would become a fabric of religions. Awe was transforming, at least in the historical record, into a largely religious emotion, reflecting our efforts to make sense of the Divine and to build community in the face of violence, expanding trade, the breakdown of the family, and the privileging of self-interest over communal sharing.
As we emerged out of the Dark Ages, we would archive awe in an explosion of art, music, literature, rhetoric, drama, and urban and architectural design. Shakespeare’s plays, for example, would stir audiences to wonder anew, as they do today. Several centuries later, Edmund Burke would detail how awe can be found in the mundane, a first philosophical championing in the West of everyday awe. The heroes of Romanticism—Rousseau, Shelley, Blake, Wordsworth—would exhort us to search for the sublime, especially in nature. They would inspire American transcendentalists, who would celebrate our roots in everyday awe found in walking in nature (Ralph Waldo Emerson), free intellectual exchange (Margaret Fuller), ordinary people in their daily lives (Walt Whitman), and mystical experiences found in religion, visions, and drugs (William James).
These ebbs and flows of awe’s history offer another answer, alongside the evolutionary one, to the question “Why awe?” Because awe allows us to get outside of ourselves, and integrates us into larger patterns—of community, of nature, of ideas and cultural forms—that enable our very survival. Tears arise in our recognition of those larger patterns that unite. And the chills signal to us that we are seeking to make sense of such unknowns with others.
We are nearing an end to our first section, devoted to a science of awe. We have seen how awe arises in encounters with the wonders of life and leads to a vanishing of the self, to wonder, and to saintly tendencies. Our interrogation of tears, chills, and whoas locates awe deeper in our mammalian evolution, finding its roots in the tendencies to recognize vast forces that require that we unite with others.
Guided by this mapping of awe, we are ready for more focused studies of how it works within our taxonomy of the eight wonders of life. Experiences with these wonders, for example with music or mystical encounter, so often transcend the reach of language and the tendencies of science to define, measure, and hypothesize within linear, cause-and-effect theorizing. Recognizing this, we will need to lean more heavily upon people’s stories of awe, such as those I heard inside prisons and near symphony halls, from veterans speaking of what it is like to nearly die in combat and from an Indigenous scholar who nearly died in a community hospital in Mexico. These stories begin in experiences of vast mysteries and unfold in individual lives through the transformative power of awe.
SECTION II
• • • Stories of Transformative Awe
FOUR MORAL BEAUTY How Others’ Kindness, Courage, and Overcoming Inspire Awe
Over time, these last forty years, I have become more and more invested in making sure acts of goodness (however casual or deliberate or misapplied . . .) produce language. . . . Allowing goodness its own speech does not annihilate evil, but it does allow me to signify my own understanding of goodness: the acquisition of self-knowledge.
• TONI MORRISON
San Quentin State Prison is a level-two prison located on San Francisco Bay. It houses 4,500 prisoners—the men in blue—including those sentenced to execution in California. In 2016, I first visited inside to give a talk as part of an inmate-led restorative justice (RJ) program, which served two hundred men.
On the night before my first visit, I looked over the instructions for visitors: Wear greens, beiges, browns, and grays—colors with no ties to gangs and which correctional officers can easily distinguish from the blues that prisoners wear, should things get out of hand. Don’t touch the inmates. No drugs. And don’t bring in weapons.
One reason for giving the talk that day was my interest in restorative justice. My deeper reason for going was being moved to awe in reading Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. Those two books archive the big idea of U.S. history: the subjugation of people of color by a succession of social systems, from the genocide of Indigenous people to slavery to mass incarceration. The awe I felt reading those books opened my mind to wonder about the everyday horrors of the U.S. caste system: about the chokehold a friend, now a professor at Stanford, had been subjected to as a teen when stopped by the police; about how an Indigenous friend was asked to leave a pharmacy when getting medicine for her parents; about how a Mexican American student of mine called his grandparents each night about the latest movements of ICE; about seeing a prizewinning honors student at Berkeley, who grew up unhoused, pick at his food suspiciously because of a lifetime of chronic hunger. Awestruck by these books, I was drawn inside San Quentin.