A Private History of Awe

A Private History of Awe
Scott Russell Sanders
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, North Point Press
2006

At the age of four, a thunder and lightning storm became a defining moment for Scott Russell Sanders. He felt “the tingle of a power that surges through bone and rain and everything … the force that animates nature and mind….” Using science he could explain what caused the thunder and lightning but not why the experience took on such meaning for him. Looking back on that moment, Sanders recognizes the feeling as “awe.” He says, “The search for communion with this power has run like a bright thread through all my days.” Using skillful prose to bring the ineffable into focus, Sanders guides the reader through other “why” questions – the ethical, political and spiritual struggles of his life.

Some will know Sanders for his contributions to the environmental literary periodical Orion. Like the magazine, his writing connects environmental, political and spiritual themes as they emerge from his life experience. A teenage memory of having to shoot a wounded deer segues into a struggle with his conscience and the Vietnam War. Here, he asks, why and when do we kill? A moment in nature provides a clue: “One day I happened to be watching as a swallow glided low over the water, dipped its bill and took a sip on the fly. Overcome by the splendour of it, I bowed. I had witnessed such aerial drinking before, but until that instant had never really seen it. As in boyhood, I disappeared into the seeing…. And in that instant I realized whatever power brought such creatures into being must indeed love life more than death, and this was the power I wished to serve.”

Sanders takes us through his boyhood in rural Tennessee and Indiana; his struggles with his alcoholic father; his romance and marriage to his college sweetheart; the birth of their first child. He interweaves past and present through observations of his first granddaughter, who is learning to walk and talk, with his mother in the last stages of dementia, who, every day, loses her ability to do the same. A 17-year cycle of cicadas in Indiana – “surging out of the ground, briefly filling the air with their calls, then subsiding to litter the ground with their myriad husks” – offers a window onto big questions. “Physics can explain why the universe might gradually run down as entropy increases,” he says, “but it cannot explain why…. Why this kind of universe, so vigorous in casting up new forms, so dynamic, so beautiful?”

Although Sanders’ undergraduate work was in physics, he gradually realized that he was learning more about what he needed to know through literature. “What I realized midway through college,” he says, “was that science could not ask the questions that kept me awake at night…. How should we treat other people … other species … the Earth, our one and only home?” And here Sanders poses the crux of his questioning: “No amount of knowledge about how nature behaves will tell us how we should behave.” We need to care. How do we learn that?

In wrestling with all the huge environmental problems we face in the 21st century, we often get overwhelmed by the enormity of the scale. Inevitably we ask, what can I, the individual, do that will count? On what basis do I make choices? The answer, Sanders suggests, comes through understanding environmental, spiritual and political interconnections.

This is a fine and often moving book that asks important questions. Sanders is a superb writer, but more than that, I feel I am getting his authentic voice – the real goods. This is the story of one thoughtful man, who, like many of us, has never lost sight of the questions, but unlike most of us, has the gift of putting his story down in eloquently straightforward prose. This is a book to read and reread and savour – much like a quiet moment of awe.

Heather MacAndrew writes and produces documentary films for Asterisk Productions Ltd. www.asterisk.bc.ca.

Originally published in Alternatives Journal’s Deep Green: Issue 35.3
Subscribe to Alternatives Today!