“Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, inquiry its progress, ignorance its end.” — Michel de Montaigne (1587)

Near the beginning of her book, The Edge of the Sea, Marine biologist Rachel Carson describes “one place that stands apart for its revelation of exquisite beauty.” It is, she continues, “a pool hidden within a cave that one can visit only rarely and briefly when the lowest of the year’s low tides fall below it.” Its inaccessibility is not limited to rare tidal conditions, but it is also physically difficult to get to, requiring her to walk precariously on a rocky ledge near a sea cliff, with swells periodically crashing over its top.

But when she got to the cave, and when she “knelt on the wet carpet of sea moss” to look into it, something magical awaited her, and through her poetic writing, us.

The floor of the cave was only a few inches below the roof, and a mirror had been created in which all that grew on the ceiling was reflected in the still water below. Under water that was clear as glass the pool was carpeted with green sponge. Gray patches of sea squirts glistened on the ceiling and colonies of soft coral were a pale apricot color. In the moment when I looked into the cave a little elfin starfish hung down, suspended by the merest thread, perhaps by only a single tube foot. It reached down to touch its own reflection, so perfectly delineated that there might have been, not one starfish, but two. The beauty of the reflected images and of the limpid pool itself was the poignant beauty of things that are ephemeral.

This passage created such a clear image in my mind that I could draw it (in fact, I have!). She has presented an image, a scene of natural beauty powerful enough to rival the ancient poetic image of Narcissus discovering and falling in love with his own reflection in a pool. How–and why–did a biologist, dodging waves in the early dawn light, come to a tide pool that only flickers into existence once or twice a year? And when she did, how did she produce an image of such literary power? And what is such an image doing in a science book?

This is an essay about natural wonder, about awe. My readings of nature writing–Rachel Carson, John Muir, Nan Shepherd, E.O. Wilson, and others–and my own experiences in nature have led me to reflect on what awe does for us, how it works, and why it elevates us.

Attraction

With these words, the U.S. National Park Service first introduces Yellowstone National Park through its web site. They invite us to Yellowstone, to observe, explore, and view its wonders: intact wildlife, half the world’s active geysers, and experience the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. A web search on Yellowstone beckons with striking photographs and ads for tour companies, hotels, and so forth. It works: about 4.5 million visitors came to Yellowstone in the past year.

I was one of them, having spent thousands of dollars in flights, hotels, and car rentals, and a day flying each way to get there. What drew me–and several million like-minded visitors–to go to such a place?

One answer can be found in the journalism of Susan Casey, who has published several books about the oceans. Her most recent, The Underworld, focuses on the deep sea, about which, she notes, we know less than we do about Mars. As tourists are drawn to Yellowstone, so is she drawn to the abyssal depths of the ocean, a nature visit far harder to achieve than a day at Old Faithful. About her desire to go, she writes,

the inaccessibility of the deep, I thought, made it even more alluring. Others wanted to visit Paris, Bora Bora, the Serengeti: I wanted to go into the ocean’s abyss. The idea of an unknown aquatic realm […] had always worked a sort of spell on me, an alchemical mix of wonder and fear.

She then focuses in on the “wonder and fear” part, which is counterintuitively at the center of her desire to go.

It may seem as if those emotions would cancel each other out, but the opposite is true. When you add them together you get the sublime, which transcends both. “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature … is Astonishment,” wrote the eighteenth century philosopher Edmund Burke, “and astonishment is the state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.” But, he added, it was “a sort of delightful horror.”

Perhaps, then, it was the prospect of experiencing the sublime, of being astonished, at being delighted by horror that motivated me to go to Yellowstone, and to its most celebrated spot, Old Faithful, a geyser that reliably goes off every 90 minutes or so.

Having made the three-hour car journey to get to Old Faithful, my partner Mali and I arrived about 45 minutes before the next expected eruption. We saw the spot of the geyser, and surrounding it a set of benches, which at that moment were sparsely used. Correctly anticipating that these benches would be crowded closer to the eruption, we chose a good one and took our place.

As we waited, small groups of people slowly came to sit around us. In one group was a large man with a black t-shirt and tattoos running up and down his arms. As we waited, he loudly made a joke about how someone “is down there in the boiler room getting ready to send her off.” A few people snickered. Over the next half hour, one at a time, groups would come and fill in the gaps around the benches. He made the boiler room joke again. More people came, and the benches were full. With a new audience, he made the boiler room joke a third time. Soon, as Old Faithful’s subterranean pressures built up to their anticipated eruption, people were standing behind the benches and sitting on the decking in between them, and in front of them, and as all this happened, Old Faithful had a few false starts. Each one of them was annotated by the boiler room joke.

I had had a picture in my mind of seeing this geyser go off as an almost spiritual experience. The geyser is, of course, both deadly and beautiful, and its power is so much greater than any human’s that I expected to be astonished in something like a delightful horror. In my imagination, I had failed to think through what Old Faithful would sound like, so focused was I on my mental image. Perhaps I thought whoever was around it would be, like me, muted by its sublime power. Perhaps I thought that the rushing eruption of boiling water high into the sky would make such a sound that I couldn’t hear anything else. But what I actually heard, with even more faithful periodicity than Old Faithful itself, was the boiler room joke.

Is Old Faithful’s over-accessibility–in contrast to Carson’s little cave and Casey’s abyssal depths–the reason it disappointed? I mean, did the Dad joke itself ruin my experience, or was it the fact that I was in the sort of place where Dad jokes are, so to speak, environmentally appropriate? I recall a question asked by Alaskan naturalist and writer Kim Heacox: who wondered if he and his companions were “disillusioned utopians searching for a place where life is celebrated and not scheduled?” Of course, Old Faithful is both celebrated and very much scheduled.

Essence

“I was a transient of no consequence in this deeply alien world I had come to love.” — E.O. Wilson

I did experience nature’s sublimity in my week at Yellowstone–many hundreds of times. Waterfalls, animal sightings, sudden vistas on striking landscapes, so abounded in Yellowstone that my partner and I started to joke that a sight that would be a 9.5/10 or 10/10 anywhere else was a disappointing 4/10 in Yellowstone and not worth even stopping for.

But what happens when a 4 out of 10 becomes a 10/10?

We had just such an experience at a place called Swan Lake. Beside one of the park’s main throughways was a small lake and a pullover. Most people don’t stop at it. Those that do typically get out of their car, walk a few feet to an overlook point, snap a photo of Swan Lake a hundred meters away surrounded by some mountains, hop back in their cars and move on. That, in fact, is exactly what I planned to do as well, because as picturesque as Swan Lake was, in that moment I’d have given it a Yellowstone-4 out of 10.

But Mali had other ideas. She noticed a small path cutting through the grasses leading toward the lake, and as my eyes left the viewfinder and returned to the real world, I saw that she was already a good way down it. I followed her down the gentle grassy slope to the lake. In the distance I could see a family of swans. The wind was blowing, disturbing the surface of the water, though every now and then it quieted enough to form a glassy mirror reflecting the mountains and sky.

Mali sat down to draw, as she does in these situations, and I knew I had the better part of an hour to spend. I walked around the lake area and eventually sat down about 20 meters away from her, experiencing quiet companionship in a serene setting. Back up at the road, cars pulled over, people hopped out and snapped a photo, before speeding away again.

With two cameras hanging around my neck, I started to think about taking a picture that would somehow capture this place and all of its elements–the serene lake, the mountains, the swans. I got it into my head that I would take a photo when the wind quieted enough to make the lake surface glassy, and where the swans were positioned beautifully in the scene, and where the cloud-dappled sunlight made an attractive pattern on the mountain. If I could photograph that, I would somehow capture the essence of the scene.

Decades earlier, and thousands of miles away, Rachel Carson was walking along a beach at night. Surveying the beach with her flashlight, its beam suddenly surprised a ghost crab, which had dug itself a hole in the beach.

He was lying in a pit he had dug just above the surf…. The blackness of the night possessed water, air, and beach. It was the darkness of another world, before Man. There was no sound but the all-enveloping, primeval sounds of wind blowing over water and sand, and of waves crashing on the beach…. I have seen hundreds of ghost crabs in other settings, but suddenly I was filled with the odd sensation that for the first time I knew the creature in its own world–that I understood, as never before, the essence of its being.

The idea of suddenly witnessing “the essence of its being” is the hinge on which the whole passage turns. Prior to that she describes the experience of her senses and of course the moment of discovering the grab. But then she has an “odd sensation” that sends her short narrative in a new direction. Further, experiencing the crab’s essence has a profound effect on her, as she continues,

In that moment time was suspended, the world to which I belonged did not exist and I might have been an onlooker from outer space. The little crab alone with the sea became a symbol that stood for life itself–for the delicate, destructible, yet incredibly vital force that somehow holds its place amid the harsh realities of the inorganic world.

Still sitting on the ground at Swan Lake, I took over a hundred photos in that hour, probably more. In the distance, cars hissed along the highway, but when I was in the moment, I could almost unhear them.

More than a month after I came back from Yellowstone, as part of an AI-related experiment with my friend and fellow bibliophile, Duncan Smith, I encountered a book called The Living Mountain, by Nan Shepherd, which is a meditative work on a Scottish mountain range, the Cairngorms. Near the end of the book, she summarizes one of the book’s main messages, which is that we need to learn how “to look creatively” at nature to experience its beauty. She concludes with a beautiful passage that I can’t help quoting:

simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.

In that hour beside Swan Lake, with Mali just on the edge of my vision, and as the swans and the clouds slowly rearranged themselves in my view, endlessly recomposing the scene, I was learning to see with a kind of love that at least was approaching, if not penetrating, its essence.

Fulfillment

“The rain fills my cup and I drink the sky” — Kim Heacox

Perhaps my favorite book that I have read all year is Ed Yong’s An Immense World, which is a Pulitzer Prize winning survey of how different animals use their senses. A truly extraordinary read, it helps readers to imagine how it is to sense in ways that we humans cannot sense. But it would be more accurate for me to have written that “my favorite book that I have had read to me all year is Ed Yong’s An Immense World,” because I purchased it on audiobook to listen in the car during my commutes. Yong reads it himself, and I have to say that my favorite aspect of the book is only available to those of us who listen to it, and that is how Yong reads his own book.

At times, when he reads his voice fills with wonder, and he is unable to contain his delight, as he seems almost shocked to read things in the book, even though he wrote it! It is as though statements about how certain insects sound when they communicate to each other through plant stem vibrations are accompanied by him declaring, “I can’t believe that all this is true! I can’t believe I get to share this with you! I can’t believe that this is my job!” The joy of his wonder carries through nearly every page, and (pun intended) the listener can sense it.

I wish I could convey to you the joy I experienced a day later, when, as the sun was beginning to set, Mali and I returned to Swan Lake, and this time we sat there for over two hours in the same spot. Again, separated by 20 meters, she drew while I took photos. At first, the swans were nearby to us, though later they drifted toward a nesting area, where they got out of the water and rested for a time. During that hour, I simply inhabited the landscape, smelling the grass and watching the scattered clouds light up, darken, and sometimes spotlight different parts of the ever-moving landscape.

The corner of my eye detects some movement, and I turn to look, but it is gone. I train my eye on the spot and a moment later, nearby, there is a disturbance, a duck or something on the water. But it is not a duck; instead, an otter has come out at dusk, romping on the surface of the water, which it does for 15 minutes, before disappearing as quickly as it had appeared. The landscape warmed as the golden hour set in.

In the editor’s Introduction to a volume on American naturalist E.O. Wilson, David Quammen writes that Wilson “could mix storytelling with big ideas, delivering a potpourri of scientific, philosophic, and narrative material in a very human, companionable voice.” As an example, Wilson introduces, in a work bearing the same name as its title, the concept of biophilia.

biophilia […] I will be so bold to define as the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes. […] To explore and affiliate with life is a deep and complicated process in mental development. To an extent still undervalued in philosophy and religion, our existence depends on this propensity, our spirit is woven from it, hope rises on its currents. […] To the degree that we come to understand other organisms, we will place a greater value on them, and on ourselves.

From there, he elaborates on the idea of wonder.

Because species diversity was created prior to humanity, and because we evolved within it, we have never fathomed its limits. As a consequence, the living world is the natural domain of the most restless and paradoxical part of the human spirit. Our sense of wonder grows exponentially: the greater the knowledge, the deeper the mystery, and the more we seek knowledge to create new mystery.

The sun is now kissing the mountains to the left of Swan Lake, and to the right, the grasses glow like gold. These patterns of perception and discovery, mystery and wonder, and the feeling of love slowly built up. Behind me, the swans have left their nest and once again glide slowly across the water, diving constantly in search of nutrition.

Gloaming

“We must risk our lives in order to save them.” — John Muir

Throughout his work, the great American naturalist John Muir frequently uses religious metaphors to describe nature–and to motivate (successfully) American politicians to protect some of its most spectacular places by designating them as national parks. He entitled a passionate essay seeking legal protections for Sequoia and other forests, “God’s First Temples.” Elsewhere, he describes Alaska’s glacier’s as “God’s crystal temple.” These metaphors, along with the statements I have shared where someone expresses the feeling that they have entered another world, are ways of expressing awe: how it feels, and what it does for us, namely, helps us access the essence of things and elevate our philosophy and even capacity to love.

The sun has now just barely slipped behind the mountain behind swan lake, so the lake and I are now in shadow. Elk are gathering in the grasses, and I wonder about unseen bears. The hills above us are still lit by that fading light, creating almost an X shape, where light and shadow, sky and water, are divided from each other in an unusual way: the sky above and lake below are bright, and to the left and right the land has sunk into shadow. A diagonally shaped cloud, reflected in the water, tilts the quadrants, creating the X effect. The effect is heightened now, because as the evening breeze has waned, the lake’s surface has smoothened into a mirror.

Now a miracle: one of the swans has somehow softly floated nearly into the crossing point of that X. An image is now before me in which all of the elements I had yearned to see come together into a single composition had suddenly done so, when I was no longer looking for it.

But there was more to it even than I had hoped: another surprise awaited me. Later, as I edited its pixels in Photoshop, the right 2/3 of the image, inside the right-hand quadrant of the X, I saw a shadowy area created by the sun’s slipping behind the mountain, the area the swan was facing, and it looked somehow unreal–shadowy and mysterious. To my eye, it looked almost as if the swan were gesturing towards a portal to another world. It was like Narnia emerging out of the back of a wardrobe.

Here is heaven and the dwelling place of angels.

The sun is setting; long, violet shadows are growing out over the woods from the mountains along the western rim of the park; the Absaroka range is baptized in the divine light of the alpenglow, and its rocks and trees are transfigured. Next to the light of the dawn on high mountain tops, the alpenglow is the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God.

Now comes the gloaming.

— John Muir, “Yellowstone Park,” 1901