Sacred Awe
In Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis has his unnamed narrator say, "I felt deep within me that the highest point man can attain is not knowledge, or virtue, or goodness, or victory, but something even greater, more heroic and more despairing: Sacred Awe."
I believe most people have experienced this at some point: a moment when they are overcome by a sense of unreality, look upon some familiar scene as though for the first time, and feel a sudden flush of fear and wonder and gooseflesh. I know I have, on several occasions, and, strange as it may sound, it catches me more frequently and more intensely when I am staring blankly at household articles than when I am gazing at the natural world. An umbrella or a toothbrush, then, have filled me with sacred awe, but not the stars or the moon. This would seem to require an explanation. In the case of the moon and stars, I think it is because they are for me so monumentally unfathomable and inhuman that my mind summarily relegates them to the category of irrelevant or superlunary things with which it is not necessary to concern myself in the course of daily life. And this same principal, specific to objects and events in space, is more generally applicable to natural phenomenon here on earth; to volcanic eruptions, stampedes of gnu, cataracts and auroral lights. Urban man does not typically see such things himself, and the mere fact of their existence, corroborated by his television, does not suffice to move him. The household articles that surround me, on the other hand, and which are presented to me in the guise of their mundane domestic functions, seem to subtly insinuate themselves into my life, become familiar, go almost unnoticed, until, during certain sudden and fleeting shifts in perspective, I realize that each one of them is as integral and substantive a part of the universe as a shoal of fish or an asteroid; I remember that while words and perceptions may be human, their external referents and objects are not; and then for a moment I feel as if my apartment has been absurdly infiltrated by the living cosmos, pieces of which have taken up positions in my room, thinly disguised as books, electric fans, armchairs, teapots, mirrors… |