Seeing the World Again: Awe and Renewal

I wanted to write a bit about reversal or renewal of perspective as a source of awe. I've seen this in a number of different literary works, but one of the examples that sticks out most in my mind is the Mapparium scene in Jhumpa Lahiri's short story, "Sexy." The story follows the somewhat rocky relationship of an Indian woman named Miranda and her boyfriend, Dev and Lahiri uses the Mapparium scene as a way to explore perspective, suggesting that things (and at times, relationships) look different from the inside than they do from without. She paints the scene beautifully with a description of Miranda and Dev standing in a vast, globe-shaped room:

[H]e showed her his favorite place in the city, the Mapparium at the Christian Science center, where they stood inside a room made of glowing stained-glass panels, which was shaped like the inside of a globe but looked like the outside of one. In the middle of the room was a transparent bridge, so that it felt like standing in the center of the world. . . The ocean, as blue as a peacock's breast, appeared in two shades, depending on the depth of the water. He showed her the deepest spot on earth, seven miles deep, above the Mariana Islands. They peered over the bridge and saw the Antarctic archipelago at their feet, craned their necks and saw a giant metal star overhead. As Dev spoke, his voice bounced wildly off the glass, sometimes loud, sometimes soft, sometimes eluding Miranda's ear altogether.

The scene initially seems full of wonder from the sheer beauty of the description and the reversal of perspective, the characters looking at the world from inside rather than outside and seeing it almost as if with new eyes. Lahiri invites the reader to look at the world from a new perspective, and in creating such awe around a reversal of perspective, she helps the reader to anticipate the later ideological reversal with regard to Miranda's own views of her relationship and what it means to be "sexy."

In her Pichi Kuchi, +Jane Packard noted, "the digital world can enhance/expand/enable enjoyment of its antithesis, the natural world," showing how things like digital webcams allow us to experience the natural world in ways that would have been otherwise inaccessible. As does Lahiri's work, such digital resources invite us to see the world through new eyes and come to a richer and/or renewed perspective on life. Awe transforms the world so that we can be transformed with it.


And, because I don't want to lose track of the list I made of various works that create awe, I'm posting that here as well.

ENGL 251 - Hansel and Grethel - the moment when they come to the house
Deprivation and then abundance as a source of awe
HONRS 201 - Qu'ran - if the oceans were ink, they should still not be sufficeint to write the words of Allah
Comparison, vastness, metaphor
ENGL 295 - The Fountainhead - Character of Howard Roarke, esp. the climax
Characters as ideals, larger than life, explosions and mass destruction, not conforming to norms
ENGL 293 - Sexy - In the Mapparium
Standing inside the world, looking at it from within rather than without (reversal of perspective)
ENGL 291 - Castle of Otranto
Horror/mystery mixed with extremely large objects
ENLG 356 - Peter Pan - first moment of flight
Contradiction then affirmation, failure then success, children
ENGL 360 - Columbus's Ultimate Goal: Jerusalem - discovery
Novel information, new perspective on something seen almost unilaterally in American history
ENGL 365 - Belle Isle, 1949 - transformation
Allusion to Edenic narrative, changing Detriot and trash into something beautiful and supernal
ENGL 292 - The Blessed Damozel - damozel leaning out on the bar of heaven
Fusion of sensual and divine, heavenly and hellish
ENGL 326 - Moby Dick - nailing dubloon to mast
shared/collective fervor; homoerotic, almost orgastic energy; unity of will
ENGL 383 - Paradise Lost - battle in the heavens
Hyperbole, exaggerated descriptions, epic heroes
ENGL 451 - Hegel's Aesthetics - climax at poetry
Logical build up to higher form of art; rich, flowery language so that mentally, we approach a climax
ENGL 320R - Fault in our Stars - picnic
Children, huge skeleton sculpture, planned event to wow Hazel
ENGL 361 - Thoreau's journal - romanticization of the simple life
Classical references, as if to imbue his own life with the heroism and grandeur of antiquity
ENGL 495 - 2001 A Space Odyssey - space travel NBD
Couching a phenomenal feat within everyday language as if to convey it is commonplace