repertoires of vocal bursts: For a review of the parallels between human emotion and nonhuman expressive behavior, see: Cowen, Alan, and Dacher Keltner. “Emotional Experience, Expression, and Brain Activity Are High-Dimensional, Categorical, and Blended.” Trends in Cognitive Science 25, no. 2 (2021): 124–36.
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When we played these sounds: Cordaro, Daniel T., Dacher Keltner, Sumjay Tshering, Dorji Wangchuk, and Lisa M. Flynn. “The Voice Conveys Emotion in Ten Globalized Cultures and One Remote Village in Bhutan.” Emotion 1 (2016): 117–28.
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an early hominid profile of awe: Stanley Kubrick’s “Dawn of Man” montage from 2001: A Space Odyssey is an artistic rendering of this idea. In the montage, inspired by Jane Goodall’s studies, our hominid predecessors on the African savannah encounter another group at a watering hole. They respond with a waterfall dance: they piloerect and, moving in unison, transform into a collective wave of threat expressed in fierce shrieks and roars. Later, waking from a sleep huddled in a cave, they are visited by a smooth gray obelisk—perhaps the idea of culture or religion—which they explore with touch, in a reverential way. In the next scene a member of this tribe discovers a bone, and its power to destroy, which he uses to kill a rival in the next encounter between the two tribes at the watering hole. That bone is thrown into the air and transforms into a space station. We transform moments of awe into culture, both beneficent and violent.
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the archaeological record reveals: Pagel, Mark. Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012.
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awe-related bodily tendencies: Dutton, Dennis. The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. London: Bloomsbury, 2009.
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the legendary poet Bashō: Matsuo, Bashō, and Makoto Ueda. Bashō and His Interpreters: Selected Hokku with Commentary. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995, 102.
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this haiku about a neighbor: Matsuo, Bashō, and Makoto Ueda. Bashō and His Interpreters, 411. Like many, I count Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window among my top ten movies, in large part, I believe, for its portrayal of the awe we experience in wondering about the lives of others. Its main character, played by James Stewart, is housebound due to a foot injury and spends his days wondering about the various characters he can see through a rear window off a courtyard in his New York apartment complex. We can find a form of everyday awe in wondering about other people’s lives and minds.
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He notes her abiding interest: Dickinson, Emily. Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems. Selections and introduction by Thomas H. Johnson. New York: Little Brown, 1961.
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“Winter afternoons”: Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005, 142.
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Literature, drama, essay, and poetry: Ashfield, Andrew, and Peter de Bolla. Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kim, Sharon. Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 1850–1950: Constellations of the Soul. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
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students were first presented: Thrash, Todd M., Laura A. Maruskin, Emil G. Moldovan, Victoria C. Oleynick, and William C. Belzak. “Writer-Reader Contagion of Inspiration and Related States: Conditional Process Analyses within a Cross-Classified Writer × Reader Framework.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000094.
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This archiving of mystical awe: For summaries, see: Walter Stace’s excellent surveys of mysticism across religions. Stace, Walter T. Mysticism and Philosophy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1960. Stace, Walter T. The Teachings of the Mystics. New York: Mentor, 1960.
