On the day of the visit, a handful of other RJ volunteers and I made our way to the dusty waiting room near the first security gate. Waiting amid wives and mothers and friends and children of the prisoners inside, we took in an art exhibit created by the prisoners—drawings, woodcuts, and paintings of flowers, sunsets, bay views, and faces of family members. It was my first encounter that day with how prisoners seek in so many ways to surface what is good in who they are—allowing goodness its own speech, as Toni Morrison put it. At the second security gate, we showed our IDs to guards standing in a plexiglass booth. Once approved, we passed through massive doors, the echoing clank of the locks astonishing in their sound of finality.
Inside San Quentin we were escorted into the prison chapel, where I grabbed a seat in the pews amid 180 men in blue. The chapel walls were bright, reflecting a pure white light glancing through the fog off the bay. The men in blue were almost all men of color, something rapper Tupac Shakur anticipated in his song “Changes” from 1998, as harshening drug laws filled U.S. prisons:
It ain’t a secret, don’t conceal the fact
The penitentiary is packed, and it’s filled with blacks.
The morning began with ceremonies from different religions: Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and Jewish. A prisoner named Grey Eagle performed on a wooden flute a sacred song from his Native American tribe, the reedy, rising notes taking our shared awareness out beyond the windows of the chapel. The morning culminated in a haka war dance led by a prisoner named Upu, 280 pounds of muscle and a force on his prison softball team. Polynesian haka dances symbolize the shimmering energy of Hine-raumati, the wife of the Polynesian sun god. She herself is an image seen in the vibrating heat that rises from the ground on hot days. This dance involves squatting with bulging biceps, fierce shouts, and threat faces of widened eyes, open mouths, and tongue displays. Upu led six enormous Polynesian islanders in the dance, shaking the room with their stomps and calls. The prisoners in the pews a few feet away watched with widened eyes and slightly open mouths.
When we mingled with the men in blue at break time, they shared pictures of their artwork. They unfolded and read carefully crafted letters to a grandmother or father. They spoke of victims and of mothers mourning lost lives. Those on the outside living privileged lives, like me, have stories that follow a coherent pattern, like the jacket copy for a novel. The stories the men in blue tell are elliptical and metaphorical, like poems—words reaching to translate chaotic, violent forces—and move with the punctate cadences of rap and the elongated tones of a sermon narrating redemption. The stories begin with youthful transgressions that I would have been locked up for were it not for the color of my skin—using drugs, selling them, shoplifting, trespassing, driving recklessly. And then fate-changing violence.
Here is my memory of one:
I grew up in a whorehouse. My dad was gone before I was born. My mom was hooked on crack cocaine. She was pimped out by my stepdad. My living room was always full of people partying. I started doing knuckleheaded things when I was ten—drugs, break-ins, carjackings. My stepdad gave me a gun when I was twelve. He tried to pimp out my sister. We got into a fight in our living room. I killed him.
And . . .
One day, two guys from a gang came to my cousin’s house, looking for him. He wasn’t there, so they shot his mom. She was sitting in her La-Z-Boy watching TV in front of her two-year-old son. My friends gave me a gun and said I had to get revenge. I tracked these guys down after school and shot two of them. But I got the wrong guys.
Social scientists now tally up ten early traumas known as adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs. Many of the men in blue are near a score of ten by the time they head to kindergarten, a vast fate that kicks the stress system into high gear, dampening prospects and shortening lives.
As the day progressed, I had the gnawing sense that awe—a focus of my talk that day—was irrelevant to the men in blue. It might even be an offense, the product of the myopia and tone-deafness of my white privilege. Of what matter is awe to people with life sentences, living twenty hours a day in a nine-by-twelve-foot cell?
Fifteen minutes into my talk, standing on a dais amid microphones and the amps of the church band, I asked:
What gives you guys awe?
And then I waited. After a second or two, here is what I heard:
My daughter
Visitors from the outside
Singing in the church band
The air
Jesus
My cellie
The light outside on the yard
Reading the Koran
Learning how to read
RJ at SQ
Today
The Wonders of Others
It is a myth that awe is rarefied, reserved for when we have enough wealth to enjoy lives of taste and “culture.” The responses of the men in blue tell us this is so. So too does recent empirical work. One study found that people who have less wealth report feeling more frequent awe during the day, and more wonder about their everyday surroundings. It is tempting to think that greater wealth enables us to find more awe, in the fancy home, for example, or exclusive resort, or high-end consumer goods. In fact, the opposite appears to be true, that wealth undermines everyday awe and our capacity to see the moral beauty in others, the wonders of nature, or the sublime in music or art. Our experience of awe does not depend on wealth; everyday awe is a basic human need.
In our daily diary studies in different countries, it was other people who were most likely to bring our participants everyday awe—actions of strangers, roommates, teachers, colleagues at work, people in the news, characters on podcasts, and our neighbors and family members. On rare occasions, disturbing acts did so, as in this story from a Spaniard:
It was in a metro station in Paris, France. It was about ten thirty p.m. We were alone at the station waiting for the train to arrive when a man arrived, swearing and screaming. He was saying something about God. I think he was sick, he took out a knife and he was punching everything he bumped into, and notching everything. We started running to get out of the metro, I don’t think I will get to the metro alone again.
And from Singapore, a story about being dumbfounded by the rise of authoritarian leaders:
When the results of the Philippines presidential elections were announced two days ago, I felt a sense of awe. The winner was this guy Duterte, who was linked to killer squads, asked to be the first to rape an Australian lady missionary who was indeed raped and killed in a prison riot, and threatened war with China! Such a man could win a presidential election??? What a man!!! Now this means that someone like Trump could be president of the United States!!! That would be awesome too because they both speak the same language. Tough talk that appeals to the most basest of human emotions. And they win!!!
We can be astonished by the depravity of fellow humans, both strangers we encounter and leaders in the public sphere, but these were rare sources of awe around the world.
Instead, over 95 percent of the moral beauty that stirred awe worldwide was in actions people took on behalf of others. Acts of courage are one kind of moral beauty with sublime potential. People using CPR to revive victims of heart attacks, parents raising children with serious health conditions, bystanders interrupting crimes or defusing fights, and organizations like Doctors Without Borders all inspire awe. Here is a story of lifesaving, courageous awe from Chile: