12 Awe
ONE AFTERNOON in a botany class at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, John Muir heard a fellow student explain how the flower of an enormous black locust tree is a member of the pea family. That the giant black locust tree and the frail pea plant, so remote in size, form, and apparent design, shared an evolutionary history astounded Muir. He later wrote: “This fine lesson charmed me and sent me flying to the woods and meadows in wild enthusiasm.”
Shortly thereafter, Muir left college. He walked 1,000 miles on a naturalist’s pilgrimage to Florida. He then moved west, to California, and in the summer of 1869, at the age of twenty, herded a couple hundred sheep through the Sierra Nevada Mountains on a trail that wound its way to Yosemite. During this trip he kept a small diary attached to his leather belt. He wrote almost daily entries about these first experiences, which eventually were published as My First Summer in the Sierras. A few days into this trip, Muir writes:
June 5
a magnificent section of the Merced Valley at what is called Horseshoe Bend came full in sight—a glorious wilderness that seemed to be calling with a thousand songful voices. Bold, down-sweeping slopes, feathered with pines and clumps of manzanita with sunny, open spaces between them, make up most of the foreground; the middle and background present fold beyond fold of finely modeled hills and ridges rising into mountain-like masses in the distance…. The whole landscape showed design, like man’s noblest sculptures. How wonderful the power of its beauty! Gazing awestricken, I might have left everything for it. Glad, endless work would then be mine tracing the forces that have brought forth its features, its rocks and plants and animals and glorious weather. Beauty beyond thought everywhere, beneath, above, made and being made forever.
The next day Muir’s immersion in the boundless beauty of the Sierras yielded the following:
June 6
We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us. Our flesh-and-bone tabernacle seems transparent as glass to the beauty about us, as if truly an inseparable part of it, thrilling with the air and trees, streams, and rocks, in the waves of the sun—a part of all nature, neither old nor young, sick nor well, but immortal…. How glorious a conversion, so complete and wholesome it is, scare memory enough of the old bondage days left as a standpoint to view it from!
Muir’s experiences in the Sierras opened his mind to new scientific insights: He was the first to argue that Yosemite Valley was formed by glaciers, as opposed to earthquakes, the conventional wisdom of the day. Out of these experiences Muir published on the need to preserve the Sierras from the ravages of sheep and cows in the influential magazine Century. These well-placed essays led to a bill passed by Congress on September 30, 1890, designating Yosemite as a state park. Buoyed by this success, Muir founded the Sierra club in 1892 and served as its first president until his dying day.
Today, when back-country hikers find high-altitude jen on the John Muir Trail in the Sierras, they are there because of John Muir. So too are groups of inner-city children backpacking near Yosemite in programs sponsored by the Sierra Club. When psychologist Frances Kuo finds in her research that adding trees and lawns to housing projects in Chicago leads local residents to feel greater calm, focus, and well-being, and crime rates drop, she is testing hypotheses that trace back to Muir’s transformative experiences of awe.
The thread that awe weaves through the life of John Muir is as revealing about the structure of this transcendent emotion as any study a scientist might deign to conduct. It is a high-wattage experience, nearly as rare as birth, marriage, and death, one that transforms people, energizes them in the pursuit of the meaningful life and in the service of the greater good. Science, until recently, has shied away from the study of awe. Perhaps Lao Tzu’s admonition is right:
The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name.
The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;
The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.
Perhaps science, built upon essentialist names and quantification, could never unearth the secrets of awe. Perhaps matters of the spirit operate according to different laws than materialistic conceptions of human nature. Not to be deterred by these concerns, evolutionists have recently begun to make the case that Muir’s experiences of wonder and awe are examples of emotions designed to enable people to fold cooperatively into complex social groups, to quiet the voice of self-interest, and to feel a sense of reverence for the collective.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF AWE
That John Muir could stand in the Sierras and experience a sense of the sacred when surrounded by the pine, manzanita, granite, cascading water, and dark lakes of those mountains is a testimony to radical thinkers who fought pitched battles about the nature of the sublime (awe) and the beautiful. These thinkers liberated the experience of awe, wonder, and the sacred from the strictures of organized religion, which had laid claim to this powerful emotion, no doubt because of its transformative powers. Most directly, Muir’s experience in the Sierras traces back to Ralph Waldo Emerson:
In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life—no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidentaclass="underline" to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.
And Emerson could preach transcendentalism in nature as a result of Enlightenment philosophers, in particular Edmund Burke, whose more secular musings provide clues to how our capacity for awe and wonder evolved.
Early in human history awe was reserved for feelings toward divine beings. Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus involved a blinding light, feelings of awe and terror, and a voice guiding him to abandon his persecution of the Christians. In the climax of the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, the hero of the story, Arjuna, loses his nerve on the eve of battle. To provide Arjuna a sense of higher purpose, Krishna (a form of the god Vishnu) gives Arjuna a “cosmic eye” allowing Arjuna to see gods and suns and to experience infinite time and space. He is filled with amazement (vismitas). His hair stands on end. He prostrates himself before Krishna, begs for forbearance, and hears and heeds Krishna’s command: “Do works for Me, make Me your highest goal, be loyal-in-love to Me, cut off all [other] attachments…”
In 1757, with the age of enlightenment, political revolution, and the promise of science in the air, Irish philosopher Edmund Burke transformed our understanding of awe. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke detailed how we feel the sublime (awe) in hearing thunder, in viewing art, in hearing a symphony, in seeing repetitive patterns of light and dark, even in response to certain animals (the ox) rather than others (a cow). Odors, Burke observed, could not produce the feeling of the sublime. In these mundane and purely descriptive observations, Burke was advancing a radical claim fitting for his times: Awe is not restricted to experiences of the divine; it is an emotion of expanded thought and greatness of mind that is produced by literature, poetry, painting, viewing landscapes, and a variety of everyday perceptual experiences.