Awe

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.

A Need for Wild Awe

In 1984, Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson called the “strange sympathies” Emerson felt in the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy biophilia, the love of life and living systems. Biophilia encompasses a rich palette of passions we feel in relation to nature. The most widely studied of these is the feeling of beauty, which we experience in viewing familiar and pleasing landscapes, such as those with rolling hills, trees, a stream or other source of water, thriving flora and fauna, and a place of elevation. Those feelings of beauty signal to our minds the resource abundance (or scarcity) and safety of a locale and orient us and those we are moving in unison with (in the context of our evolution) to set up camp in what we would call home.