Awe полностью

That night watching my brother’s life cycle end left me awestruck, and then deeply awe-deprived. I went in search of awe to find how to make my way again. In experiences of awe across the eight wonders of life, I learned that there is more to our existence than what ends with the last breath of the body. That I could feel and hear Rolf in gentle breezes and in being embraced by a powerful, warming sun. And that he and I shared some kind of awareness in spaces of feeling beyond what we ordinarily see and hear. And that the people we love, and our companions in a life of awe, remain with us in even more mysterious ways after they leave, enabling an opening to new wonders of life. And that these lessons can be found in seeking awe—which leads us to our last chapter.

ELEVEN EPIPHANY

The Big Idea of Awe: We Are Part of Systems Larger Than the Self

Whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

• CHARLES DARWIN

Charles Darwin’s emotions so often gave rise to his big ideas, including the science of emotion, of which the story of awe is but one chapter. Caring for his ten-year-old daughter Annie until her death shaped his thinking about the evolutionary benefits of sympathy. His humble curiosity about fellow human beings brought Darwin, of a privileged background, into conversations with working-class pigeon breeders, opening his eyes to their science of breeding species for signature qualities, or adaptations. His kind cheerfulness on the Beagle held the crew together as Captain Robert FitzRoy suffered a nervous breakdown, and enabled a five-and-a-half-year voyage of incomparable and inexplicable wonders.

Might awe have shaped Darwin’s thinking about evolution?

In The Descent of Man in 1871 and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872, Darwin locates the emotions we experience today in the vast story of mammalian evolution. Reading his descriptions of more than forty emotional expressions is an epiphany, as rich a portrayal of emotional expression as any, except perhaps that of Japanese artist Kobayashi Kiyochika’s print series 100 Faces from 1883. But Darwin never used the word “awe” in these descriptions.

Perhaps awe—so often a religious emotion—was a psychic battleground for him. To tell a story about the mammalian evolution of awe would challenge the creationist dogma of his era, one his devout wife, Emma, hewed to. That dogma held that our self-transcendent emotions, emotions like bliss, joy, sympathy, gratitude, and awe, are the handiwork of God, placed into human anatomy and our social lives by some form of intelligent design. Perhaps Darwin was avoiding awe to keep the peace at home.

Frank Sulloway knows the details of Darwin’s life and work better than just about any scholar you might encounter, so I dropped by his office to solve a mystery, the mystery of Darwin’s awe. Frank’s office is the outward expression of his mind. On the walls hang framed photographs he took during his eighteen trips to the Galápagos, arresting images of tortoises, pink flamingos, and cacti-dotted volcanic landscapes. Yellow Post-it notes on his computer contain scribblings of statistical equations. Most prominent of all is a three-foot-tall stack of Darwin and His Bears: How Darwin Bear and His Galápagos Islands Friends Inspired a Scientific Revolution, Frank’s new children’s book, whose main character, a bear, tells the story of how he guided Darwin to his discoveries.

For his senior thesis at Harvard in 1969, Frank wrote about the eight-person film expedition he organized the previous summer to retrace Darwin’s footsteps in South America, during his voyage with HMS Beagle, and focused on the role that the Beagle voyage had in Darwin’s scientific development and conversion to the theory of evolution. This thesis included a computer-aided content analysis of all the letters written by Darwin during the voyage, to his family and his mentor, John Stevens Henslow.

For his PhD in the history of science at Harvard, Frank wrote his thesis on Freud, which would become Freud, Biologist of the Mind and garner Frank a MacArthur genius award. But Freud’s allure, Frank tells me, quickly wore off—his thinking seemed closed and arrogantly unfalsifiable.