A Brief Wondrous Personal Narrative

My senior year of high school was a time of serious literary exploration, perhaps the most serious and defining of my life. I, like any high school kid, I think, was looking for something greater to connect with, something to latch on to and make my purpose and meaning in my life that could lead to a meaningful career and unique perspective.

Literature had long been my source of epiphany, escape, and enlightenment, and I was positive some piece of literature would contain my answers. I had read many of the "classics," but I felt a particular need to be true to my own generation--to know what was going on now in literature, to help the world takes its next steps rather than just focus on the past. A book or short story or poem just didn't seem to really count to me if it was older than five years. The world was changing and I needed to know how literature was changing with it.

But school is seldom about what's going on outside its walls, especially high school, and there were no contemporary literature courses available for me to take, so I was forced to find my own way into the scary and chaotic world of contemporary literature.

I figured award winners were the easiest and obvious answer to point me in the right direction. And that's when Oscar Wao fell into my lap. Having won the Pulitzer prize that same year, I figured it was a sure bet for a good perspective on how literature was in my own time.

I opened the cover to find the epigraph:

"Of what importance are brief, nameless lives...to Galactus??"

 Fantastic Four, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (Vol. 1, No.49, April 1966)

Frustrations with "Awe"

There are no pertinent pictures for abstract musings, so this
is Shangri La. You'll have to just pretend you're there if you
want the full effect, because as Walter Benjamin notes, the
age of mechanical [digital] reproduction is not the best at
reproducing aura/awe.

I've had a tough time wrapping my head around the idea of awe this semester, because I feel like it can be so subjective (and as I'll discuss later, I think moments of awe are most often isolated and individual). As I've read posts from people's wonder journals, I've thought to myself time and time again, "I'm not feeling it," and at times I get the sense that sharing my moments of awe through social media is really just cheapening my true moments of wonder and making me search for them in places where they aren't. I grew even more frustrated when I read Burke's treatise on the sublime, because though I followed his argument and found myself agreeing with pretty much everything  he was saying, I still didn't really feel like it encapsulated my idea of awe or wonder at all. It's then that I began to wonder if maybe awe and the sublime are not so synonymous as we like to make them and, aside from that, if awe is truly communicable. The conclusion that I've come to is that while awe and the sublime are certainly related, they nonetheless represent separate experiences which are transferable but not to the same effect or potency as the original experience.

So, as to the question of whether the sublime and awe are the same thing, I thought about what each is composed of. I originally did a ton of searches for the physiology of awe/wonder/the sublime but turned up little that was of value. Apparently, scientists care little about things like the sublime, and those involved in humanities research have a poor working definition of physiology, because the only things I could find were interpretive, personal findings rather than the brain scans and endorphin maps that I was hoping for. So, as personal, opinionated interpretations are all that is to be had, I figured I would offer my own.