Awe

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.