The great fun of reading and watching a wide variety of things is the discovery of unexpected connections. Today we have: Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, the (apparently) final book in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, a widely loved work of science fiction; Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, a prizewinning 2012 novel set in rural Appalachia; and… the life story of Dante Alighieri, the medieval author of The Divine Comedy, a three-part work of which “Inferno” is probably the most famous and familiar. Between them, I realized it’s high time for me to write about something I’ve been thinking about for years: a useful distinction we can make between “awe” and “wonder.”

Let’s start with Oliver Jole. He’s the admiral of the space fleet of the planet Barrayar, stationed above the planet Sergyar, discovered about 40 years previously. The humans colonizing Sergyar have been learning how to co-exist with its rich and fascinating native ecology, but Oliver hasn’t seen much of that. He’s basically a bureaucrat, keeping his crews and ships ready in case of war, although thankfully things have been peaceful. He’s also turning 50 years old, and wondering about the next stages of his life. Oliver’s long-time love interest has recently passed away at age 87, which was still middle-aged because human life expectancy has improved. Now he’s considering whether to start a new relationship. He’s also considering whether to have children, which no longer requires a female partner or surrogate because conception and gestation can be handled in a laboratory. With these topics on his mind, he heads to the countryside for a weekend date with an old friend (and potential new lover), Cordelia Vorkosigan. They go sailing, get drenched in a sudden rainstorm, and spend a romantic night together, and then the next day they go out on the lake again, this time in an unusual, transparent canoe. From page 129:

“Oh, you have to see all this,” said Cordelia, the first words she had spoken for a while. “Turn around and take a look.”

Jole shipped his paddle, grasped the thwarts, and swung around with all the due care of a fully dressed man not wishing to convert his boat ride into a swim. The canoe was broad in the beam, however, and quite stable for its class. He stared down through the hull, and then, after a moment, slid to his knees for a closer view. And then to his hands and knees.

It was like being a bird looking down through an alien forest. He could count three…six, eight different sorts of little creatures moving through the shading stems. Even more shapes than the round and six-limbed models familiar from dry land, and remarkable subtle colors, reds and blues, silvery and orange, in stripes and spots and chevrons. A larger ovoid slid past, then jerked aside; its… meal?… escaped in a gold flash and a cloud of bronze smoke, and Jole laughed half in surprise, half in delight. “What are all those things? What are they called?” And why, for all the times he’d skimmed over this very lake, had he never noticed them before?

Now let’s turn to Flight Behavior, which I just finished reading last night. It starts with our point-of-view character, Dellarobia Turnbow, hiking up the mountain behind the Tennessee property where she lives with her dull-witted but generally kind husband and their two small children, next-door to her rather tiresome parents-in-law. Dellarobia needs something more from life. At this point she’s prepared to throw away everything she has for a tryst with a hot young guy she’s met, and as her thoughts go on and on, we readers hope she’ll rethink that decision, although what she’d be throwing away may not be that great. As she approaches the place they’ve planned to meet, though, Dellarobia comes across something extraordinary. (I’m going to condense the text, as it lasts for several pages, pages 13-16.)

“…here something was wrong. Or just strange. … The view across the valley was puzzling and unreal, like a sci-fi movie. … The branches seemed to writhe. She took a small automatic step backward from the overlook and the worrisome trees, although they stood far away across the thin air of the hollow. She reached into her purse for a cigarette, then stopped.

“A small shift between cloud and sun altered the daylight, and the whole landscape intensified, brightening before her eyes. The forest blazed with its own internal flame. “Jesus,” she said, not calling for help, she and Jesus weren’t that close, but putting her voice in the world because nothing else present made sense. The sun slipped out by another degree, passing its warmth across the land, and the mountain seemed to explode with light. … “Jesus God,” she said again. No words came to her that seemed sane. Trees turned to fire, a burning bush. … A forest fire, if that’s what it was, would roar. This consternation swept the mountain in perfect silence. …

She was on her own here, staring at glowing trees. Fascination curled itself around her fright. This was no forest fire. She was pressed by the quiet elation of escape and knowing better and seeing straight through to the back of herself, in solitude. She couldn’t remember when she’d had such room for being. … Unearthly beauty had appeared to her, a vision of glory to stop her in the road. … A valley of lights, an ethereal wind. It had to mean something. … The burning trees were put here to save her. It was the strangest conviction she’d ever known, and still she felt sure of it. … Her eyes still signaled warning to her brain, like a car alarm gone off somewhere in an empty parking lot. She failed to heed it, understanding for the moment some formula for living that transcended fear and safety. She only wondered how long she could watch the spectacle before turning away. It was a lake of fire, something far more fierce and wondrous than either of those elements alone. The impossible.”

Several days pass before Dellarobia heads up the mountain again, and this time she brings her glasses (which she’d left at home before, wanting to look good for her prospective lover). I don’t want to give a spoiler here, but I can say that what’s actually there is both astonishing and reasonably consistent with real-world biology. Hint: You could see something very much like this if you visited a certain region of Mexico at the right time of year.

The event becomes a turning point in Dellarobia’s life, as scientists, activists, and journalists all come to the mountain. As the reader has long suspected, she’s actually very bright – her problem is that the world of her daily life has been much too small. Pregnant and married at 17, she’s been isolated at home with her two little kids; the world has been passing her by.

These two books obviously have some things in common. They’re written by American women and were published three years apart. They both have a character named Cordelia! And – most relevant for what I’m writing about today – they are each about someone who has an experience of the natural world that leads them to become fascinated with biology as a science. The two experiences, though, are very different in one important way.

For Oliver Jole, seeing the bizarre aquatic creatures in Lake Serena is an experience of wonder – he is drawn in by its beauty and his curiosity, and he immediately starts asking questions that would let him see the creatures as part of a larger system.

For Dellarobia, seeing the strangeness of the forested valley is an experience of awe – it completely pulls her away from what she was already thinking and doing; she isn’t sure whether to be afraid or not. She wants to know how it fits into the big picture of how things work, but her initial impression of “forest fire” is clearly wrong, and she’s too skeptical for a religious explanation. However, even without an explanation she feels the experience has changed her life. It’s only later that she can start to put together an accurate understanding of how the world has changed.

People often lump wonder and awe together (including, apparently, Dacher Keltner, the world’s leading scientist studying awe), but the distinction can be important. Awe pulls you out of your conventional and current mental world to grab your full attention. It’s not necessarily a positive or a negative experience in itself, although it can lead to wonder (if it’s relatively benign and you have the space to think about things) or shock (if it’s disrupting your world in a potentially major way). It says, “Your way of thinking how things work isn’t enough, here’s something huge that doesn’t fit.”

Wonder, which can certainly start with awe, also catches your attention, but it then engages your reflective thinking. It’s generally positive and not overwhelming. It says, “Your way of thinking how things work needs to expand to make room for something new.”

Awe turns off thought and makes us small. Wonder engages thought and transcends our usual smallness, making us a part of something bigger.

Awe is often closely linked with religion, especially in societies that don’t have an expansive understanding of the world that allows for that understanding to grow. Wonder, on the other hand, is one of the primary inspirations for science.

We can “consume” awe recreationally, traveling the world to see its most impressive sights, or watching movies or playing video games that dazzle us with things we never expected to see. We can also learn to “practice” wonder, teaching ourselves to see things we’ve never before noticed, right here in front of us, and to consider connections between these things and everything else.

And that brings me to Dante. I’ve been watching a PBS show about him, Dante: Inferno to Paradise. The show is four hours long, and I’m barely an hour into it, but I was already generally familiar with the part I’m going to write about – it was just that watching the show in proximity with reading the two books started showing me these interesting connections.

When he was 9 years old, Dante visited the home of a neighbor and saw the daughter of the family, Beatrice, who was 8 or 9 herself. Apparently she was extraordinarily beautiful, or radiated qualities of spiritual perfection, or both, because from that point onward, Dante was obsessed. As the narrator of the show tells us, “All through his childhood and on into adolescence, he searched for her often in the streets of Florence, yearning for another glimpse.” (I suppose stalking isn’t as creepy for a child to do as it would be later?)

Then when they were both 18, she actually said hello to him. This was enough to make him fall into a vision, and later he wrote a poem about it, beginning his career as a writer. He continued to write poems about her for the next seven years, during which they both became married to other people, and then, at age 24, she died. He probably went into shock. He spent more than two years trying to get himself together again, eventually dealing with his loss by organizing everything he’d written about her – and writing yet more – to create his first book, La Vita Nuova.

Soon after its publication, Dante became active in local politics – his hometown of Florence, Italy, was a republic. Unfortunately for him, his turn to hold public office coincided with a civil disturbance such that he found himself exiled from Florence for the rest of his life. Again his world had been upended. Everything he had known all of his life had ended, and he had to put together a new life on the road or during times of sanctuary with various nearby aristocrats.

So we have a pattern here. He experienced awe when he first met Beatrice, and then again nine years later when she spoke to him, and from that time onward he wrote about her again and again, treating her as an ideal woman (following the “courtly love” theme we know from the age of the troubadours, but integrating more Christian idealism). Eventually he dealt with her death through a great act of organization – he was no longer stunned but could think about her more systematically, essentially writing a memoir of her and his encounters with her.

Then he was exiled, his world upended again. How did he deal with it this time? With an even more massive writing project, this time creating a vast new system of how everything important works, his Divine Comedy. I’ll note here that in the classical world, a “comedy” wasn’t necessarily funny – rather, it referred to the restoration of order, with a happy ending. And what could be a happier ending than to pass through the world of sin (the Inferno), to the world of penitent understanding (Purgatorio), and finally to arrive in Heaven (Paradiso)?

The book is both an allegory of Christian redemption and, at its beginning, an allegory of Dante’s own disorientation, as he finds himself in a place unknown to him, with no clear understanding of how he is to move forward. A guide appears (the poet Virgil) and takes him on a tour of the first realm, the Inferno, or Hell. Within each of the realms, Dante describes seven levels in great detail, articulating numerous sins and virtues in relation to each other. Naturally, when he gets to Heaven, Beatrice reappears to become his final guide.

Neither Dante’s exile nor the Divine Comedy (nor, for that matter, the death of Beatrice) begins with an encounter that causes awe, but they do feature its after-effects: an anxious sense of disruption that tells us things are not as we thought. Dante’s gift was to be able to transmute this disturbance into a new, well-organized understanding of how things work, ranging from his shorter meditation on the influence of Beatrice’s life to his vast, all-encompassing poem of the afterlife, fueled by wonder and eventually by joy.

Header illustration was cropped from “Dante reading the Divine Comedy at the court of Guido Novello,” painting by Andrea Pierini, 1850, from Wikipedia.