By Ethan Maurice | August 31, 2021
I am currently reading a book entitled The Denial of Death by Ernest Beckett. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. As I’ve been quite into contemplating death for the clarity it brings to life for over a decade, I was surprised I had gone so long without knowing of the book before hearing its mention on a podcast a few weeks ago.
I immediately ordered a copy. By the time I was done with the introduction, I understood why I’d never heard its mention: the book is an unsettling, veil-lifting deconstruction of the psychological constructs that create us.
Yesterday, I encountered a passage on awe that struck me like lightning. I must have read it four times over and its implications have been echoing around my head ever since:
“The world as it is, creation out of the void, things as they are, things as they are not, are too much for us to be able to stand. Or, better, they would be too much for us to bear without crumbling in a faint, trembling like a leaf, standing in a trance in response to the movement, colors, and odors of the world. I say “would be” because most of us — by the time we leave childhood — have repressed our vision of the primary miraculousness of creation. We have closed it off, changed it, and no longer perceive the world as it is to raw experience. Sometimes we may recapture this world by remembering some striking childhood perceptions, how suffused they were in emotion and wonder — how a favorite grandfather looked, or one’s first love in his early teens. We change these heavily emotional perceptions precisely because we need to move about in the world with some kind of equanimity, some kind of strength and directness, we can’t keep gaping with our heart in our mouth, greedily sucking up everything with our eyes everything great and powerful that strikes us. The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived all they would be naturally paralyzed to act.“
What Becker was getting at here is something which I have long suspected but was never sure: that we close off to the perception of awe and wonder. As we age, we do not grow to understand that reality is plain, old, and boring. No — quite the contrary — we repress our perception of the incredulousness of reality to such a degree that it feels plain, old, and boring.
While long at the inner-project of stoking my sensitivity to awe, I have always wondered whether I was trying to take my blinders off or to set rose-colored glasses before my eyes. Encountering this passage and coming to understand that we “repress our vision of the primary miraculousness of creation” in order to function in the world meant I was, in fact, trying to remove my blinders and live closer to the miraculousness of what is.
That night, a thunderstorm of epic proportions rolled over Phoenix. I was sitting at my desk when I noticed lightning flashing across the window multiple times a second. Moments later, a resounding pour of rain hit the roof.
That quote fresh in mind, rather than stay inside like any sensible adult, I did as a child might: I stripped down to my underwear and ran out into the backyard. Afraid I might be struck by the machine-gun frequency of lightning, I lied down and let those outpouring clouds drench me in sheets of rain. Like one of those Five Gum Commercials, a whole-body-deluge of cold, heavy, wet drops mixed with the hot air of a desert summer night. Time was lost, but probably somewhere between five and fifteen minutes later, the rain slowed and I opened my eyes to a lightning display of indescribable scope and force.
I tried to simply see those towering hydroelectric gas clouds roving and zapping the surface of the Earth less as a concept and more as a crazy-ass occurrence happening before my eyes. My laughter was lost in the crack and roar of thunder as I recognized myself utterly insignificant in the face of the vast, swirling, incomprehensibly powerful processes of our planet, which of course, is but a mote of dust in the scale and scope of the universe.
In the wake of the storm, I find myself wanting to double down on my blinder-removing efforts. I wonder, can we renew our sense of awe? Can we remain that open for life? Can we walk through the days we know so well with the clarity of a child’s eyes?
For all is incredible and surreal and absurd on our swirling, living, breathing, blue-green-space-marble — we have just become blind to be able to function among it.
My favorite poet, Jack Gilbert, once wrote: “we must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.” I wonder, must we?
photograph by: Elias Sch.
