Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung January 18-19 2025
Sometimes, as we know, life can imitate art and art can imitate life. I want to extend this idea from two recent experiences to suggest that what we read can imitate life and the reverse also happens.
Recently I attended a webinar in which one of my former students in mythological studies, having just published a book entitled The Practice of Enchantment. Her chapters were initially short essays for the Joseph Campbell Foundation website. She gathered these over the years to create these fascinating vignettes of where enchantment emerged in her life. Of course, when the time came, we all had stories to tell of when we too were enchanted, often by the ordinary, not the spectacular or once-in-a-lifetime moment.
She then suggested a book whose title enchanted many of us: Dacher Keltner’s Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life. It conveyed so much more than a self-help book. As scientists, he and a colleague laid out 8 fundamental life experiences common to people around the globe, in whatever religion, language, ethnicity they were part of.
Located at Berkeley, the pair had a team of helpers translating many of the 26 languages that people used in submitting moments of awe in their lives. The results astonished both Keltner and his social science colleague. Some 2600 narratives were gathered and catalogued. They put them into categories of what was most and least able to meet the criterion of the word awe. Here is how they defined the term: “Being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that transcends your current understanding of the world.” That’ it.
Powerful, scientifically based and spiritually inflected. What they discovered as they worked through the submissions was the following. “What most commonly led people around the world to feel awe was other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming. They concluded that this human behavior signaled a feeling of awe “when moved by moral beauty,” which ismarked by purity and goodness of intention.
Second story, where reading imitates life. I recently took my wife to our local hospital for some tests that she was not looking forward to but knew needed to be done. After getting her settled with the nurse that would take her back for the procedure, I sat down and breathed a long sigh of relief. A woman across from me in the waiting room looked up at me and said: “You look like you need a hug. I was at first taken aback, then said, “yes I do.” She got up, walked over to me and hugged me. I immediately felt better, more settled, less rattled. She explained that she was waiting on her husband to see what the source of his pain was.
I felt like I needed to know her name and tell her mine. Without even thinking, I told her of the book above that I was reading and that she might like it. She wrote down the author and the one word: awe.
Soon, an orderly came to let her know her husband was now resting quietly in a recovery room. She said goodbye to me and wished my wife a positive result from her tests. I sat there and thought, yes, it sometimes happens that what one is reading materializes in a human situation in the world. What energies, forces, or saving graces are present to allow such awe-filled moments to occur? More than enough here to wonder about for some time.