To be human is to suffer from a peculiar congenital blindness: On the precipice of any great change, we can see with terrifying clarity the familiar firm footing we stand to lose, but we fill the abyss of the unfamiliar before us with dread at the potential loss rather than jubilation over the potential gain of gladnesses and gratifications we fail to envision because we haven’t yet experienced them. Emerson knew this when he contemplated our resistance to change and the key to true personal growth: “People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.” Rilke, too, knew it when he considered how great upheavals bring us closer to ourselves: “That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.”

When faced with the most transformative experiences, we are ill-equipped to even begin to imagine the nature and magnitude of the transformation — but we must again and again challenge ourselves to transcend this elemental failure of the imagination if we are to reap the rewards of any transformative experience.

In Transformative Experience (public library), philosopher L.A. Paul illustrates this paradox and examines how we are to unbind ourselves from it in a simple, elegant thought experiment: If you were offered the chance to become a vampire — painlessly and without inflicting pain on others, gaining incredible superpowers in exchange for relinquishing your human existence, with all your friends having made the leap and loving it — would you do it?

Art by Edward Gorey from his special illustrated edition of Dracula

Paul writes:

The trouble is, in this situation, how could you possibly make an informed choice? For, after all, you cannot know what it is like to be a vampire until you are one. And if you can’t know what it’s like to be a vampire without becoming one, you can’t compare the character of the lived experience of what it is like to be you, right now, a mere human, to the character of the lived experience of what it would be like to be a vampire. This means that, if you want to make this choice by considering what you want your lived experience to be like in the future, you can’t do it rationally. At least, you can’t do it by weighing the competing options concerning what it would be like and choosing on this basis. And it seems awfully suspect to rely solely on the testimony of your vampire friends to make your choice, because, after all, they aren’t human any more, so their preferences are the ones vampires have, not the ones humans have.

This hypothetical situation, she points out, is an apt analogue for our most important life decisions:

When you find yourself facing a decision involving a new experience that is unlike any other experience you’ve had before, you can find yourself in a special sort of epistemic situation. In this sort of situation, you know very little about your possible future, in the same way that you are limited when you face a possible future as a vampire. And so, if you want to make the decision by thinking about what your lived experience would be like if you decided to undergo the experience, you have a problem… You find yourself facing a decision where you lack the information you need to make the decision the way you naturally want to make it — by assessing what the different possibilities would be like and choosing between them. The problem is pressing, because many of life’s big personal decisions are like this: they involve the choice to undergo a dramatically new experience that will change your life in important ways, and an essential part of your deliberation concerns what your future life will be like if you decide to undergo the change. But as it turns out, like the choice to become a vampire, many of these big decisions involve choices to have experiences that teach us things we cannot know about from any other source but the experience itself.

Our minds, lest we forget, are prone to misleading us — just as people’s confidence in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence upon which those beliefs are founded, the cost-benefit estimations we make of an as-yet unknown state reflect the suppositions drawn from our current state and not the actual features of the potential and wholly unfamiliar state. When faced with a choice on one side of which lies life as we know it and on the other a transformative experience, we can’t imagine what life on the other side would be like — what we are currently missing — until after we’ve undergone the transformation. (Interestingly, an intuitive awareness of this is at the root of the psychology of our fear of missing out.) Paul writes:

You know that undergoing the experience will change what it is like for you to live your life, and perhaps even change what it is like to be you, deeply and fundamentally.

It seems, then, that there is an equivalent to Gödel’s incompleteness theorem about the limits of logic in consciousness and its vassal, the imagination.

In consonance with psychologist Daniel Gilbert’s memorable assertion that “human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished,” Paul adds:

In many ways, large and small, as we live our lives, we find ourselves confronted with a brute fact about how little we can know about our futures, just when it is most important to us that we do know. For many big life choices, we only learn what we need to know after we’ve done it, and we change ourselves in the process of doing it. I’ll argue that, in the end, the best response to this situation is to choose based on whether we want to discover who we’ll become.

North Pacific Giant Octopus by photographer Mark Laita from his project Sea

In a sentiment that calls to mind the deaf-blind Helen Keller’s touching account of her first experience of dance and affirms the value of marine biologist Rachel Carson’s pioneering invitation to imagine Earth from the perspective of nonhuman creatures, Paul writes:

Unless you’ve had the relevant experiences, what it is like to be a person or an animal very different from yourself is, in a certain fundamental way, inaccessible to you. It isn’t that you can’t imagine something in place of the experience you haven’t had. It’s that this act of imagining isn’t enough to let you know what it is really like to be an octopus, or to be a slave, or to be blind. You need to have the experience itself to know what it is really like.

This brings out another, somewhat less familiar fact about the relationship between knowledge and experience: just as knowledge about the experience of one individual can be inaccessible to another individual, what you can know about yourself at one time can be inaccessible to you at another time.

How to access that invaluable perspective — what Seamus Heaney called “your own secret knowledge” — is what Paul explores in the remainder of her immensely insightful Transformative Experience.

Nothing on Earth appears more divine yet attests more fully to the materiality of being than clouds — enchanting emblems of the water cycle that makes this rocky planet a living world, drifting across our shared dome as if exhaled by some lovesick god. That we should have such a ready supply of wonder hovering above us at all times is one of those daily mercies never to be taken for granted.

Like trees, clouds are sovereign wonders, but they are also mirrors — silver-lined portals to contemplation, windborne prayers for the conciliation of the ephemeral and the eternal in us. Whenever we look up, we are looking in. The shapes we see in them slake our ancient yearning for order in the chaos. Their tenderness awakens our own. Their beguiling evanescence affirms Octavia Butler’s insistence that “God is change.”

Study of Clouds in Moonlight, 1848. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

“Clouds are thoughts without words,” the poet Mark Strand wrote in his love letter to clouds. Two centuries before him, Goethe found great artistic inspiration in the young science of meteorology. In his passionate search for wholeness in nature, he saw clouds as a way “to find yourself in the infinite.” When he encountered the pioneering cloud classification system devised by a young English meteorologist, poems poured out of him that popularized the cloud names we use today.

A generation after clouds became the subject of science, the Norwegian artist Knud Baade (March 28, 1808–November 24, 1879) rendered their enchantment in a way no photograph ever could.

Cloud Study, 1843. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Anyone who has photographed a sunset with a smartphone has watched the soft, subtle pinks vanish in the digital image, replaced by harsh, flat orange. Part of this is due to the optical superiority of the human retina, whose dynamic range of color and light sensitivity vastly exceeds that of a camera — the eye is constantly moving between different regions of the view, dynamically adjusting to variations in brightness and darkness, while the smartphone camera relies on a static algorithm for color adjustment; as the blue light of dusk enters the sky, it attempts to auto-correct the white balance by overcompensating in the opposite direction, adding extra yellow that turns the pinks orange. “The Sun’s Light when he unfolds it,” Blake wrote, “Depends on the Organ that beholds it.”

But much of it is due to the entwined history of vision and consciousness — it is consciousness, not optics, that ultimately renders the breathtaking beauty of a sunset. Unlike a camera lens, the human eye moves dynamically across a scene, taking in not a single image but a multitude of images with varying exposures and color balances, which the brain then composites and superimposes near-instantaneously into the sunset you see.

A camera paints with optics, but an artist paints with consciousness.

Cloud Study, 1838. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Cloud Study, 1839. (Available as a print and as a notebook.)

Too poor to afford finishing his education at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Baade dropped out at the dawn of his twenties and began his career painting traditional landscapes and portraits — technically good, unexceptional paintings that put food on his table. He moved with his father to a small parish in the Norwegian countryside, where he walked long hours under the open skies, drinking in the majesty of the mountains and the fjords.

And then, in his mid-thirties, something broke open in him. He looked up, looked in, and, a year before the invention of photography, began painting transcendent cloudscapes — storms and sunsets, wisps of cirrus over treetops and status blankets over the Moon.

Cloud Study, circa 1830s. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

He called them his “cloud studies” — a lovely reminder that every act of observation, whether channeled in a painting or a poem or in the private chamber of the mind, is both an act of reverence and an act of scholarship, for we spend our lives learning to see more clearly and feel more purely. (Georgia O’Keeffe knew this when she contemplated the art of seeing: “To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” she wrote.)

Like Beethoven, who went on composing even as he began losing his hearing, Baade went on painting his cloudscapes even as an eye disease began savaging his vision when he was only in his thirties — a poignant testament to how the mind’s eye is our only real lens on beauty, on wonder, on the transcendent in the everyday.

Cloud Study over Poplars, circa 1830s-1840s. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Cloud Study, 1838. (Available as a print and as a notebook.)

Cloud Study over Landscape, 1838. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Cloud Study, 1850. (Available as a print and as a notebook.)

Cloud Study, 1838. (Available as a print and as a notebook.)

Clouds in Moonlight, 1843. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Complement with the enchanting moonscapes of Baade’s reclusive American peer Albert Pinkham Ryder, then revisit the story of how the clouds got their names and the poetic science of how clouds helped us discover cosmic rays.

“Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote in her landmark treatise on the intelligence of emotions, “they are parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself.”

Two decades later, this elemental truth about the nature of living things has migrated from the realm of philosophy to the realm of physical science as we discover that feeling gave rise to sentience and not the other way around, as we reckon with the inner life of dogs, as we concede wonder-smitten that something not mechanistic but mysterious and lush with feeling is animating the bowerbird’s astonishing enchantment in blue.

Out of this recognition has arisen a new biology that is revolutionizing everything we thought we knew about life, just as the revelation of the quantum realm a century ago revolutionized everything we thought we knew about matter — a biology of feeling and interdependence, in which everything alive is in conviviality with everything else, part of a vast symphony of vitality sonorous with feeling.

A century and a half after the German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term ecology to give shape to the interlaced foundation of the living world, the German marine biologist and cultural scholar Andreas Weber explores this new understanding of life in The Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science (public library) — a nuanced and deeply original inquiry into the fundamental question of what life is, how it lives itself in us, and what part we play in the grand symphony.

Art by Sophie Blackall from If You Come to Earth

Weber writes:

Organisms are not clocks assembled from discrete, mechanical pieces; rather, they are unities held together by a mighty force: feeling what is good or bad for them. Biology… is discovering how the individual experiencing self is connected with all life and how this meaningful self must be seen as the basic principle of organic existence… Feeling and experience are not human add-ons to an otherwise meaningless biosphere. Rather, selves, meaning and imagination are the guiding principles of ecological functioning. The biosphere is made up of subjects with their idiosyncratic points of view and emotions. Scientists have started to recognize that only when they understand organisms as feeling, emotional, sentient systems that interpret their environments — and not as automatons slavishly obeying stimuli — can they ever expect answers to the great enigmas of life.

At the heart of Weber’s view of life is his notion of poetic ecology — an ecology in its recognition that “all life builds on relations and unfolds through mutual transformations,” and poetic in its understanding of feeling and expression not as epiphenomena or observer’s bias, as Western science has assumed at least since Descartes, but as “necessary dimensions of the existential reality of organisms.”

Poetic ecology restores the human to its rightful place within “nature” — without sacrificing the otherness, the strangeness and the nobility of other beings. It can be read as a scientific argument that explains why the deep wonder, the romantic connection and the feeling of being at home in nature are legitimate — and how these experiences help us to develop a new view of life as a creative reality that is based on our profound, first-person observations of ecological relations. Poetic ecology allows us to find our place in the grand whole again.

In a sentiment that calls to mind Denise Levertov’s exquisite poem about our self-expatriation from nature, Weber adds:

This understanding provides us with a home in the wilderness again, in the creative natura naturans, that so many people are longing for in their private lives, that they create in their gardens, that they visit during hikes in the wilderness and that they seek to protect.

Central to this poetic ecology is the concept of enlivenment, which holds that “every living being is fundamentally connected to reality through the irreducible experience of being alive” — the biological affirmation of quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger’s koan-like insight that “this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole.”

Art by Sophie Blackall from If You Come to Earth

Much of this biological cosmogony rests upon the legacy of the visionary evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, whose Gaia hypothesis gave shape to the then-radical insight that “life is a unitary phenomenon, no matter how we express that fact,” and that “we abide in a symbiotic world.” Central to it also E.O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis — the idea that we, with all our feeling and sentience, evolved to seek connection with the rest of nature.

Echoing Rachel Carson’s poetic insistence that because our origins are of the Earth, “there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity,” Weber writes:

Nature… is the living medium of our emotions and our mental concepts.

[…]

All our qualities — and particularly the most human ones like our need to be in connection, to be perceived as an individual, to be welcomed by other life and give life, in short, our need to love — spring forth from an organic “soil.” We are part of a web of meaningful inter-penetrations of being that are corporeal and psychologically real at the same time. Humans can only fully comprehend their own inwardness if they understand their existence as cultural beings who are existentially tied to the symbolic processes active inside nature.

Art by Arthur Rackham for a rare 1917 edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. (Available as a print.)

There is consolation in this view of life, this fidelity to the natural poetics of ecology — it gives us a more spacious way of bearing our own mortality. A century after the dying Tolstoy took solace in the knowledge that in nature “when existing forms are destroyed, this only means a new form is taking shape,” Weber reflects:

Perhaps the most important psychological role that other beings play is to help us reconcile ourselves with our pain, our inevitable separation as individuals from the remainder of the web of life and our ephemeral existences. The primal feature of nature is that it always rises again, bringing forth new life. Even the most devastating catastrophe gives way over time to green shoots of rebirth and productivity and therefore to hope for ourselves.

In consonance with Carson’s passionate belief in wonder as the antidote to self-destruction, Weber insists that owning up to our interrelation with the rest of life — to the fact that each of us is a living verse in the epic poem of nature — is our only path to our planetary salvation:

The conceptual framework that we have invented to understand organisms is the deeper reason for our environmental catastrophe. We are extinguishing life because we have blinded ourselves to its actual character… The real disconnect is not between our human nature and all the other beings; it is between our image of our nature and our real nature.

Complement The Biology of Wonder — a deeply enlivening read in its entirety — with the pioneering neurophysiologist Charles Scott Sherrington on the spirituality of nature, Hermann Hesse on wonder and how to be more alive, and Rachel Carson on how to save a world, then revisit ecological superhero Christiana Figueres — who carries Carson’s torch in our own time — on the spirituality of regeneration.

Uncommon Presents from the Past: Gifts for the Science-Lover and Nature-Ecstatic in Your Life, Benefitting the Nature Conservancy