Awe

Hiking each day, we would catch glimpses of Mont Blanc at ever-changing angles, through always-shifting cloud cover and fast-moving mists, while wandering through green valleys and up rocky passes, seeing Wordsworth’s “morning radiance” and being awestruck by the Alps’ “succession without end.” Mont Blanc is never the same. Cloud-shrouded one day. Luminous and creamy the next. Often barely discernible. Other times vast and transfixing. I came to feel transparent to “the all.” I felt the green seep into my body, porous to the mountains. The blithe air indeed lifted my sense of self into an infinite, clear space. I sensed Rolf spread out through the Alps’ valleys and in the air surrounding their peaks.

On the last day of the tour, I took the gondola up to the top of Mont Blanc, packed in with rock climbers, tourists, Swiss families, and excited children, all hooting when we were carried up the face of the mountain. On the return we dropped down near the face of Mont Blanc in that gondola, all feeling grateful for Swiss engineering. Small, dense rainbows shimmered on the imposing ice of the mountain. They shifted, pulsing, from green to blue to purple to red. The last color was a reminder, for me, of Rolf’s red hair. And that at certain angles white light reveals a spectrum of color that astonishes. And that there are still wonders and mysteries that lie ahead. And that, somehow, he is still part of them.

SECTION III

• • • Cultural Archives of Awe

SEVEN MUSICAL AWE How Musical Awe Embraces Us in Community

I listen with my body and it is my body that aches in response to the passion and pathos embodied in this music.

• SUSAN SONTAG

Yumi Kendall senses the world in musical forms. When she hears the horn of a Honda, she tells me, it is a G-sharp, and B-natural in a minor third. At a Philadelphia Phillies baseball game, a foul ball hits the rafters nearby—to her ears and mind, it is a pure B. C major is her home base, where she feels open to the world.

Yumi’s mother was raised in a traditional rice-farming village in Japan. Upon learning of her parents’ plans for her marriage, she said “no” with youthful gusto, Yumi tells me, and moved to St. Louis, Missouri. There she began a new life as a babysitter, taking care of children who studied violin with Yumi’s grandfather, John Kendall, who brought the Suzuki method to the United States. In the context of those lessons, Yumi’s mother met John Kendall’s son; they married and created a very musical family.

Yumi was breastfed listening to her older brother learning the violin. At five, Yumi chose the cello. Playdates were chances to play music with childhood friends. She fell asleep to a lullaby her dad sang nightly. When Yumi recounts this to me, she begins to sing ever so faintly:

Come over the sea in my boat with me

The waves are breaking high

It’s up and down we wander

Beneath the summer sky . . .

Lullabies are a sonic medium in which parents create somnolent awe, ushering in the wonders of sleep and dreams. Those lilting songs, mixed in with the rituals of gentle touch and soothing words, shift the child’s physiology to a high-vagal, oxytocin-rich profile associated with a sense of belonging and connection. This is true for infants, one study found, even when listening to lullabies from other cultures. Lullabies integrate parent and child into the high-touch, synchronized patterns of community, and occasion early embodied ideas about locating ourselves within them.

Today, Yumi is an award-winning cellist for the Philadelphia Orchestra, a position that was not easy to attain. Since the 1970s, performers have auditioned behind screens, but that didn’t always prevent conductors from rejecting Yumi upon discovering her gender—even after judging her the best. Seeing Yo-Yo Ma play Bach’s Cello Suites, though, was an experience of musical awe and moral beauty: it taught her that a human being can play these complex pieces in one sitting, no matter the gender and racial biases of the times.

For Yumi, music is a symbolic medium of awe. It is where we express and understand together what is vast and mysterious, and how we make sense of the wonders of life. This notion found full expression in the writings of the Romantics, who viewed music as the artistic realm of the sublime. Beethoven, a hero of Romanticism, created music that, in the words of E. T. A. Hoffmann, “sets in motion the machinery of awe, of fear, of terror, of pain, and awakens that infinite yearning which is the essence of romanticism.”