Awe

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.