Awe

In our tour of the why of awe, we have journeyed back in evolutionary time to imagine an early hominid profile of awe involving tears, piloerection, huddling, sounds like whoa, widened eyes, open arms and hands, and other social behaviors, such as touch. This was the awe, we can imagine, of perhaps ten thousand Homo sapiens a couple hundred thousand years ago, which brought them together to unite in food sharing, huddling when cold, scaring off predators, and hunting large mammals—tasks required for our hypersocial survival, and in relation to patterns in weather, ecosystems, life cycles of flora and fauna, and migrations of animals. These early forms of awe were about joining together to face peril and the unknown.

Some 80,000 to 100,000 years ago, the archaeological record reveals, language, symbols, music, and visual art emerged. Homo sapiens became a cultural primate and would quickly archive awe with our ever-evolving symbolic capacities. With the emergence of language-based representation, we began to describe the wonders of life to others, using words, metaphors, stories, legends, and myths, and with visual techniques in paintings, carvings, masks, and figurines. Through symbolization, we dramatized our bodily expressions of awe in singing, chanting, dance, dramatic performance, and music. And through ritualization, we formalized the patterns of awe-related bodily tendencies, for example bowing and touching, into rituals and ceremonies.

In archiving awe in myriad cultural forms, we joined with others in cultural and aesthetic experiences of awe to understand the mysteries of our very social living. This was the thesis offered by Robert Hass, the U.S. poet laureate from 1995 to 1997, in a twelve-minute tour of the role of awe in literature and poetry at a conference in Berkeley in 2016. As he detailed this idea, he embodied literary epiphanies with whoas, our ancient sounds of recognizing the sublime.

Hass began with a riff on Aristotle’s idea of catharsis. Twenty-five hundred years ago, catharsis was a purifying ritual: a person would wash themselves with oils prior to entering the home if they had encountered dangerous spirits. Drama, poetry, and literature, which allow us in the safe realm of the imagination to wonder and gain insight into human horrors, can serve as symbolic, ritualized acts of cleansing—transforming human harm and horror into aesthetic representations that stir awe.

Hass then moved on to Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex: A king sleeps with his mother, kills his father, and then gouges out his own eyes. At the play’s end the chorus sings of being cursed with such knowledge about the horrifying conflicts that can ruin families. Turning to the audience, Hass raised his eyebrows and leaned in:

WHOA.

Hass then fast-forwarded two thousand years to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra, both ending in scenes of horrifying death. At the end of Antony and Cleopatra, “the earth cracks and shivers at its core.” Cleopatra’s death is so powerful it gives chills to the earth! Noting this, Hass lifted his gaze from his notes and looked out to the audience:

WHOA.

Audience members startled. Laughing and nudging friends, they wondered where Hass’s tour would take them next, and then shifted their attention back to the podium.

There Hass turned to a lifelong source of awe for him: haiku. It is customary for haiku poets to write one poem about Mount Fuji, a sacred place of awe for more than two thousand spiritual communities in Japan. He quoted the legendary poet Bashō.

In the misty rain

Mount Fuji is veiled all day—

how intriguing!

WHOA.

And then this haiku about a neighbor the poet lives near:

Autumn deepens—

the man next door, what does he do

for a living?

WHOA.

We can find everyday awe in wondering about other people’s minds and the patterns of their lives.

At about the eighth minute of this brief history of literary awe, Hass landed in the words of Emily Dickinson—“one of the greatest writers in the language,” he observed. Her poems come out of a state of low blood sugar, Hass joked. They reflect her efforts at grappling with the yearning to connect with infinity in the nineteenth century, as the “big daddy” God was fading. He notes her abiding interest in death and grief.

He read:

There’s a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons —

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes —

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us —

We can find no scar,

But internal difference —

Where the Meanings, are —

None may teach it — Any —

’Tis the seal Despair —