Awe is wanted so badly at present because it is so rare.
My hunch is those who dwell in peace, ease, and safety can learn a crucial lesson in awe from two seemingly unconnected things—war and children.
Let us start with war.
When I would drop to the ground beneath gunfire I would witness a moment between two different worlds. There existed a universe between world one—calmly savoring the cavernous river valley sprawling before me—and world two—executing a movement on the enemy position
Something strange happens. Time freezes. My awareness hones in on the micro rivets along the edge of a single blade of grass; the hollow thwack of a bullet slamming sun-dried mud bricks; the primeval scent of henna the Afghan soldier at my side rubbed into his fingers earlier in the day; and the eerily perfect smoothness of a single drop of goat shit.
Suddenly, each moment becomes meaningful, hyper real, significant.
Suddenly, each moment becomes a thing of awe.
Ernst Jünger has a way of reminding me of memories I rarely take the time to resurrect. At other times, he helps me put words to memories I simply stored away in my knuckle dragger mind, a phase of life in which I was more concerned with accumulating experiences than I was on learning from those experiences. Jünger was a deeply thoughtful man. He embodied the soul of a warrior-poet more than any man I have ever dug into. He is a Muse to me.
Jünger wrote about a mighty battle in WWI where he fought his way across muddy trenches, barbed wire, corpse-ridden death-strips. It was a never-ending blur of lobbing grenades… pausing for the blasts… then sprinting and shooting, repeated as nauseum “under clouds of shrapnel;” of tripping and crawling over Scottish Highlander corpses whose muscular legs lay lifeless beneath checkered kilts, warriors whose way of fighting reminded Jünger “we were dealing with real men;” of pausing and watching soldier after soldier crumble from sniper bullets, egg grenades, and screeching mortars; of shooting a “Scotsman who wrote me a nice letter from Glasgow afterwards, with an exact description of the location where he got his wound;” of urinating in water-cooled machine gun canisters to avoid being overrun; and finally of going berserk while sprinting in the open to finish off the retreating foe and getting shot in the chest.1
He describes the moment he found himself lying face down on the ground: “I supposed I’d been hit in the heart, but the prospect of death neither hurt nor frightened me. As I fell, I saw the smooth, white pebbles in the muddy road; their arrangement made sense, it was as necessary as that of the stars, and certainty great wisdom was hidden in it. That concerned me, and mattered more than the slaughter that was going on all around me.”
And thus in one of the most extreme battles in the history of our species, and while bleeding out through a bullet hole in his chest, a couple white pebbles scattered on a gravel road left him struck in awe.
Let us make sense of this.
What, then, is awe? According to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, it is made of two parts: First, an encounter with a vast, deadly power. Second, an imperfectly rational understanding of this encounter.2
War, like Nature, is a vast and deadly power. When steel slugs and mortars crack the air or split the skin, micro perceptions become macro awakenings: the sheer magnitude of it all turns a tenth of a second into an infinity of lifetimes. Suddenly a prewritten future we were sure was certain—a predictable progression from school, to job, to house, to retirement, to a quiet death in old age—is worth nothing compared to the next glorious inhale of cold air into our living lungs. Suddenly in the face of momentous events we are revealed as no more than a little spark of consciousness chambered in a bit of skull bone. How simple. How extraordinary. It is terrifying and it is awe-some. The significant point is the terror makes it awe-some.
Awe cannot be rationally understood in the moment. Nor even after decades of mulling it over. I am certain Jünger was never able to grasp the wisdom hidden in the arrangement of those white pebbles. Personally, I do not understand how a single drop of goat shit near my face as I lay near it under fire can turn a television screen on inside of my skull. I do not understand how this television can play the entire history of life on earth in one tenth of a second, from bacterium twitching in primordial soup to the complexity of a human mind capable of contemplating its own capacity for contemplation. And I do not understand how after three and a half billion years of birth, killing, dying, chaos, calamity, love, hate, life after life after life, this bit of goat shit and I are now sharing this moment together in an ancient river valley.
Now we come back to the awe-deficient present.
It is all too easy to slip into an awe-less frame of mind in the absence of awe-givers like war and nature. We all do it. It might go like this: “I do not see a deadly vast power in my day to day. My experience is that bloody kilts and volcanoes are fictions, events that happen on pixelated screens or on islands like Whakaari. My experience is life is all too knowable; predictable; it is sameness; it is why Bill Murray in Groundhog Day struck a chord.”
The significant point is adults are blinded by their “experience.”
How, then, do we get awe back without the worst of war and bloody kilts and volcanoes?
I realized I had felt the same sort of awe I felt in combat but at an earlier point in life—when I was a child.
Within every man and woman with wrinkles round their eyes and a creeping sense of tiredness, of sameness, of ennui, there still exists a six year old child—their six year old selves.
Let us see with the eyes of a child again. We see the inky black cosmos flashing with millions of bluish-white stars for the first time. We are struck by an un-worded understanding: we are fragile sacks of blood and bone and breath; the cosmos can destroy us and snuff our little lights out. Existence is therefore something terrifying, and yet precious. Something immense and unknown. We come to know awe.
This is still true beneath all the bullshit we mire our adult minds in. Beneath all our worries. Our goals. Our “experiences.” It is a reminder that if our everyday experience does not lead to awe, then it is not actually experience—it is a delusion, a fiction, a violation of nature.
Aldous Huxley said “Experience is not what happens to a man. It is what a man does with what happens to him.”
What then?
The fateful questions of peace, ease, and safety are these: Will we ground our daily experience in awe? Will we compare whatever we are anxious about to the taste of a single red strawberry? Will we compare the voices in our skulls to the sounds of some breathing thing—mate, child, dog—sleeping at our side during a conscious moment in the still hours of the night?
Will we admit, like Socrates, how little we know and thus stand in awe of how much we may learn on this stone adrift in the cosmos?
Will we remember, like a child, that worthless white pebbles and bits of goat shit are significant because the time we have been given is significant?
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Jünger, Ernst. Fire and Blood: A Soldier’s Testament. Translated by Arnold J. Pomerans, New York, Howard Fertig, 1979
Keltner, Dacher, and Jonathan Haidt. “Approaching Awe, a Moral, Spiritual, and Aesthetic Emotion.” Cognition and Emotion, vol. 17, no. 2, 2003, pp. 297–314. Routledge.
I'm not sure if I am misinterpreting something, but this description of awe by Jonathan Haidt makes me think of the father in Cormac McCarthy's "The Road", and how he describes the desolate landscape around him.
Death follows him and his son on every step, danger is lurking everywhere, and still, what he notices the most is the tiny details of the ashen ground up to the grey and silent serpentines of a nearby creek...
It's harrowing, but beautiful and awe-inspiring at the same time!
Wow an incredible piece!! Thank you!