Awe: the powerful emotion with strange and beautiful effects | Oliver Burkeman

Feeling awe has been linked to health and happiness ... but the experience is its own justification

The other day, I got fairly decisively lost while hiking in the French Pyri(C)ni(C)es. Not seriously lost, since I had a functioning iPhone, and was never much more than an hour's walk from a road where, in a crisis, I could doubtless have flagged down a grudging French motorist. (Is there any other kind?) But just lost enough to feel the first frisson of something like fear: enough to be reminded that mountain ranges are very large and solid things, whereas I am a tiny and fragile thing, and that it takes a vanishingly small amount of effort on the part of a mountain range to kill a human.

I say "something like fear", incidentally, because the experience wasn't wholly unpleasant: the frisson had a distinctly pleasurable component. Actually, there's a word for this combination of terror, euphoria and smallness in the face of vastness, which constitutes the oddest and least understood of emotions: awe.