EVEN TODAY, AWE AND wonder are underexplored emotions — those feelings of being amazed, overwhelmed, quieted or surprised by something truly extraordinary, magicaclass="underline" the wonder of a black hole, cauliflower clouds, the slash of lightning, a blue sky, neon scales, curling cyclones, roaring meteors, tiny petals, feathers arced in flight.
The sense of awe and wonder engendered by such natural phenomena is a fishhook for curiosity. Take rainbows, for instance. For millennia humans have tried to understand the startling magic of rainbows. In dozens of myths and legends they were depicted as an archer’s bow, a snake, a bridge. For Christians, rainbows have long been a sign of God’s grace, and a promise that the Earth would never again be destroyed by a global flood. For Buddhists, the rainbow body is the highest state achievable before attaining Nirvana. In some countries, the sight of a colourful bow spanning the skies was a fearful one: children scurried into hiding places to avoid looking directly at it (in Honduras and Nicaragua) or being eaten by a demon (in Myanmar); elsewhere, people closed their mouths, men nervously girded their loins.
In Bulgaria, the superstitious said that if you walked under a rainbow, you would change genders, immediately starting to think like a man if you were a woman, and a woman if you were a man. In ancient Japan, Hawaii or Greece, rainbows served as bridges between the heavens and the Earth, the ancestors and gods. For Indigenous Australians, the sacred rainbow snake represents the life-giving creator.
The first modern thinker to study rainbows — and show how they occur — was the French philosopher, mathematician and eccentric genius René Descartes, who believed that wonder was the greatest of the passions. In 1628, when living in the Netherlands and studying metaphysics, he heard about the spectacular appearance of a host of false suns — known as sun dogs or parhelia — in the sky over Rome. He determined to study light, and rainbows followed. In 1637, Descartes wrote the oft-cited line: Cogito ergo sum, or ‘I think therefore I am’, in his book Discourse on the Method. What few know is that in the same book, he provided what his biographer A.C Grayling called ‘the first satisfactory explanation of rainbows’, describing how airborne water, light and refraction interact to conjure those extraordinary sights.
ENGLISH PHILOSOPHER FRANCIS BACON called wonder ‘broken knowledge’, a gap in understanding that some race to fill, if they can. (Both Plato and Aristotle also believed philosophy was rooted in wonder.) Wonder prompts us to ask questions of each other and the world. It is also an antidote to distraction. As Robert Fuller, professor of religious studies at Fuller University argues in his fascinating book Wonder: From Emotion to Spirituality, the experience of wonder is one of the defining elements of human spirituality.’ It fuels art, science and religion. American philosophy professor Jesse Prinz describes this ‘wide-eyed, slack jawed feeling’ as ‘humanity’s most important emotion’.
The significance of awe and wonder is far broader than just maintaining our sanity. As American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, a professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, has argued, a core part of being human is wondering about creatures other than ourselves. And yet, these days, wonder seems to be on the wane, or we tend to wonder mainly about ourselves, instead of allowing wonder to lift us up out of our own self-interest and help us to understand others and the natural world better. Rachel Carson was concerned that ‘most of us walk unseeing through the world, unaware alike of its beauties, its wonders, and the strange and sometimes terrible intensity of the lives that are being lived around us’. That’s still true today. Even to catch a glimpse of another creature’s suffering is to be humbled, sobered. And if we don’t pay attention to the Earth, to each other, we all suffer. As it is, we are already bearing witness to a planet where rivers are choked with poison, rainbow corals are being bleached white, swallows are disappearing and insects are vanishing.
Children understand awe and wonder as naturally as breathing. Yet we must also actively teach them to observe and wonder, says Nussbaum. It might begin with nursery rhymes. As Nussbaum writes in her essay ‘The Narrative Imagination’:
When a child and a parent begin to tell stories together, the child is acquiring essential moral capacities. Even a simple nursery rhyme such as ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are’ leads children to feel wonder — a sense of mystery that mingles curiosity with awe. Children wonder about the little star. In so doing they learn to imagine that a mere shape in the heavens has an inner world, in some ways mysterious, in some ways like their own. They learn to attribute life, emotion, and thought to a form whose insides are hidden.
Singer and songwriter Nick Cave agrees with this approach, partly as a result of his belief that humans will always seek the transcendent. Given the ugliness of much of what we see online and hear in news bulletins, he says he has always seen it as a parental duty to show his own children ‘beautiful stuff, and in so doing reveal to them an alternative world’.
Some of us need to teach ourselves how to wonder again, how to be ready for that sensation. When was the last time you had goosebumps? Sometimes by seeking awe and wonder, we can open ourselves up to other experiences, too. David Hoadley, for example, would be sorely disappointed if he missed a nearby tornado, but said that often ‘after a few hours of dejected driving, the night sky would darken, clear itself of clouds, and a million sparking diamonds would appear’. He would then pull over on the side of the road, stop his car, ‘turn off the lights, look up — and begin healing, amidst wonders that make my small pain even smaller — until it disappears altogether. How can anything you say, or do, or feel matter beneath such stunning beauty and depth? This is also storm chasing.’
MOONBOWS EXIST TOO, AND serve as a reminder that occasionally we can be blinkered, or blind to the wonder in front of us. For they are fainter and can seem plain white from a distance or in low light. Yet they are full of colour.
It’s possible to reveal the full spectrum of pigments in a moonbow using long-exposure photographs. You need to wait, and wait, and wait to draw out the vivid hues, and often only then will it become apparent that the full panoply of colours was there all along. You just could not see them in the dark.
Chapter 4
Why We Need Silence
Let tiny drops of stillness fall gently through my day.
— Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann
IF I IMAGINE HELL as a physical place, of torture and pain, it’s not the heat that troubles me most; it’s the noise. Hell surely means living in the unceasing din of a construction zone with no time limits, where earplugs and noise-cancelling headphones are banned. In the Middle Ages, Christian scholars believed noise was used as a weapon by Satan, who was bent on preventing human beings from being alone with God, or fully with each other, alert and listening. The fictional devil in The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis detests both music and silence. Hell, he crows, is filled with furious noise, ‘the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless and virile . . . We will make the whole universe a noise . . . We have already made great strides in this direction as regards the Earth. The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end.’
Sometimes it seems we’re already there. ‘The day will come,’ said Nobel Prize–winning bacteriologist Robert Koch in 1905, ‘when man will have to fight noise as inexorably as cholera and the plague.’ British author Sara Maitland stands ready. She believes the mobile phone was a ‘major breakthrough for the powers of hell’. Maitland is more conscious of noise than most — she spent more than a decade pursuing silence like a hunter chasing its prey. In A Book of Silence, she describes how she travelled to the desert, the hills and the remote Scottish Highlands trying to discover what silence truly was, and immerse herself in it. ‘I am convinced that as a whole society we are losing something precious in our increasingly silence-avoiding culture,’ she writes, ‘and that somehow, whatever this silence might be, it needs holding, nourishing and unpacking.’