Even after the dust storm raged past, the orange sky stuck around for a while. There would be other orange skies that I’d stare up into that year in Iraq but never had I been stuck inside the storm as it scoured past me. We can do whatever we want on this planet, I remember thinking, but the world will always win—so we might as well build as much joy, real joy for all people while we’re here.
So often, vast circumstances confine us, like a life sentence in prison or tending to people who are dying, or racist immigration law, or combat, circumstances that seem to “always win.” But in recognizing the vastness of such fates, that we are “a tiny speck” in a “huge place,” we can find a “freeing feeling” and even an urge to build “real joy for all people.” We so often experience transformative awe in the hardest of circumstances.
After returning to the United States, Stacy fell into an overheated abyss. He had lost good friends on tour. His girlfriend broke up with him while he was away. Images of the dead invaded his mind: a young girl killed by U.S. bullets; a dog eating the neck of a bloated dead man in a pile of trash. About one in five Gulf War veterans falls into major depression. The suicide rate for younger veterans, like Stacy, is among the highest of any group in the United States. About a quarter of veterans binge-drink regularly. Stacy turned to hard alcohol, cocaine, and speed. And edgy, compulsive partying. A suicidal voice was making loud suggestions in his mind.
As he was spiraling downward, a friend insisted that before Stacy blow his brains out, he go climbing with him on the Flatirons near Boulder, Colorado, a series of five sandstone slabs that jut upward to heights of over seven thousand feet. Stacy had rappelled down tall vertical walls dozens of times. On this day, though, tied to a wall of rock, looking down hundreds of feet, he froze. His body trembled. He sobbed. What was the point of his service? A career in the military? The lives of the people he saw die? His life? A single phrase arose in his mind.
GET OUTDOORS.
Strange Sympathies
Every experience of awe you enjoy today links you to the past, to others’ experiences of the sublime and how they made sense of them within the ever-evolving cultural forms that archive the wonders of life. Stacy Bare’s experience of wild awe traces back to an epiphany experienced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
In 1749, Rousseau was on his way to visit his friend, the philosopher Denis Diderot, who was serving time in a prison in the outskirts of Paris. As he walked through rolling hills, Rousseau mulled over this question: “Has the progress of the sciences and arts done more to corrupt morals or improve them?” Today we might ask: “Have globalization and capitalism lifted up our quality of life, or paved the way for our demise?”
Contemplating that question knocked Rousseau to the ground. In a trance state, he saw the brightness of a thousand lights. He sobbed uncontrollably. He was shaken by an epiphany: The much-hyped promise of the Age of Enlightenment, of science, industrialization, formal education, and expanding markets, was a lie. It was destroying the soul of humanity. It was a companion of the systems of slavery and colonization, and a cause and rationalization of economic inequality. It was decimating the forests of Europe, polluting its skies, and filling its streets with filth. And smothering the wisdom of emotion.
Rousseau’s epiphany was that in our natural state, we are endowed with passions that guide us to truth, equality, justice, and the reduction of suffering—our moral compass. We sense these intuitions in music, art, and, above all, being in nature. It is institutions like the church and formal education that disconnect us from our nobler tendencies. In that experience outdoors in the hills outside of Paris, Romanticism was born.
Within the philosophy of Romanticism, the purpose of life is to free yourself from the confines of civilization. Find yourself in freedom and exploration. Passion, intuition, direct perception, and experience are privileged over reductionistic reason. Life is about the search for awe, or what the Romantics called the sublime. Music is a sacred realm. Natural processes—thunder, storms, winds, mountains, clouds, skies, life cycles of flora and fauna—have spiritual meaning and are where, above all else, we find the sublime. Rousseau was urging Europeans to get outdoors.
The spirit of Romanticism would inspire Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein during a stormy holiday in the Alps. It would stir the poetry of Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Wordsworth, which my mom taught in her English courses at California State University, Sacramento. This spirit gave rise to a holistic kind of science that sought truth in images, metaphors, art, and unifying ideas alongside the necessary, reductionist breaking down of phenomena into parts. It led to the epic voyages of James Cook, Alexander von Humboldt, and eventually Darwin, and their poetic portrayals of the natural world. Romanticism transformed our relationship to nature, once viewed with terror and superstition.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was moved by this spirit of Romanticism. Grief-stricken at the death of his wife, Ellen, at age twenty-two, Emerson traveled to Europe, making his way to Paris. There, in July 1833, Emerson experienced an epiphany in the Jardin des Plantes.
In 2018, I felt impelled to visit the Jardin des Plantes, and went inside its Gallery of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy, which is the size of a basketball gym at a small college. Its insides look like a train station that might have been painted by impressionist Claude Monet: cast-iron frames surround an off-white, diaphanous ceiling illuminated from outside. Upon entering, the visitor is greeted by a sculpture from 1758 of a skinless man with taut red muscles. He stands in front of a procession of a hundred or so skeletons of every imaginable species, from gorillas to narwhals to hyenas to chimpanzees. It is a day-of-the-dead awe walk of comparative anatomy. His head and eyes are oriented upward to a faraway horizon, or perhaps the skies, his mouth open, his eyes alive. He is awe in the flesh.
Here is our leader of the awe walk of comparative anatomy. This sculpture is from 1758 and was used at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in drawing classes.
Touring the perimeter of this march of skeletons, I encountered jars containing the brains of pigs, dogs, elephants, and humans. One held a white kitten floating in blue fluid, frozen as if falling from deep space to the ground. Crude papier-mâché sculptures of bisections of various animals stood in cabinets. In one area, jars contained genetic anomalies—a headless puppy, a two-headed pig, human twin fetuses joined at the jaws. Visiting children stood unusually close to their parents, leaning in, their mouths agape. The parents fumbled for words to explain.
For Emerson, the riches of nature, of organized flora and fauna, that he encountered in the Jardin des Plantes stirred wild awe:
Here we are impressed with the inexhaustible riches of nature. The universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever, as you glance along this bewildering series of animated forms. . . . Not a form so grotesque, so savage, nor so beautiful but is an expression of some property inherent in man the observer,—an occult relation between the very scorpions and man. I feel the centipede in me,—cayman, carp, eagle, and fox. I am moved by strange sympathies. I say continually “I will be a naturalist.”
In Emerson’s being moved by “strange sympathies,” we find the pattern of awe—vastness (“inexhaustible”), mystery (“the universe is a more amazing puzzle”), and the dissolving of boundaries between the self and other sentient beings (“occult relation”; “I feel the centipede in me”). Amid the profusion of forms of different species, even the lowly centipede, there is an intuited life force that unites us all. Emerson’s epiphany was about the big idea in the air at the time: that all living systems, from the skeletons, organs, muscles, and tissues of different species to the sense of beauty and design in our minds, have been shaped by natural selection. He was sensing a sacred geometry underlying what Darwin would call “endless forms most beautiful,” and decided that day to “be a naturalist,” finding his spiritual life in wild awe.