The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (26 page)

I stopped dead in my tracks. I had never seen anything like it in my life. Never such a creature. Never such a living thing. A substantial chunk of the pure blue cloudless sky which had fallen to earth. It was probably, I suppose now,
Morpho peleides
, or maybe
Morpho menelaus
– I can’t make a judgement because I was too stunned to note down any details. I was rooted to the spot, even as the others turned and shouted,
Mike, come on, the rain’s coming!
for it was enormous, not only in physical size but in its blueness, its iridescent metallic blue, its brilliant blue, its burning blue, its incandescent blue . . . I forgot about the deforestation of the Amazon. I forgot about the Suruis and their inaccessible village. I even, beshrew me, forgot about the heart-stopping face, for the first time in weeks, and nearly four decades later, when I close my eyes and think of the rainforest and the
morpho flutters out of the trees, I smile when I realise that, even if momentarily, it actually eclipsed the passion, and I would have said to you, then, I would have sworn to you, that nothing, nothing whatsoever, could do that.

Over the years I have had a number of such encounters, such as my first silver-washed fritillary, floating down through the oak woods of the Haddeo valley on Exmoor, and my first Camberwell beauty on a forest track in Provence, and my first monarch in a Boston garden – they might be common to Americans, but they aren’t to me – and what has characterised them all has been intense emotion, a feeling almost of being struck dumb, and I have gradually come to understand it, and to realise that this is what I experienced in Sunny Bank; and its name is wonder.

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In a book about joy, this is a digression of sorts, but a necessary one, for wonder is the other great feeling which nature can trigger in us, and that we might experience it, seems to me even more remarkable than the fact of the joy experience. I have written about it, fairly briefly, in the past: I once described as a sense of wonder the emotion felt by myself and my then eleven-year-old son in listening together to a nightingale sing a few feet away from us, deep in a wood at midnight; and I think that many people may have experienced such a feeling in their encounters with the natural world, and been greatly moved, without perhaps understanding exactly what the sentiment is. To explore it therefore seems worthwhile, as my instinct is that wonder as much as joy may show us the way to our nature bond, which was forged in the psyches of our distant ancestors and is surviving in ours today.

Today, though, wonder is much like joy in the popular mind,
in that it is discounted: in a secular and sceptical age, it is not a notion we have much to do with, and it figures little in our everyday discourse. Yet it is there in the repertoire of human feelings as much as it ever was. It is related to joy, perhaps, but there are significant differences: one, that it is harder to define. There is no doubt that joy is a concentrated happiness, however we characterise its overtones, while wonder is a concept on which thousands of words have been expended, without a generally agreed definition being arrived at.

The
Concise Oxford
has a useful stab at it: ‘An emotion excited by what is unexpected, unfamiliar, or inexplicable, esp. surprise mingled with admiration or curiosity’. I would put it rather differently: I would say wonder is a sort of astonished cherishing or veneration, if you like, often involving an element of mystery, or at least, of missing knowledge, but not dependent upon it; for true wonder remains when the mystery is no more, or when the missing knowledge is supplied. It involves ‘an astonishment which does not cease when the novelty wears off’ (Kant, quoted by the British philosopher Ronald Hepburn).

My sense of it is of an emotion by which we are overcome, comparable to the religious experience, on the one hand, or the aesthetic experience, on the other, and it signifies that there is something very special to us about its object, perhaps through what that object makes us feel about our place in the world. I think deep down the feeling is, that we are astonished to be in a world which can contain such a phenomenon – the nightingale singing in the darkness, say – and somehow, the astonishment then reaches out beyond the sense of our place in the world, merely, to the fact that we exist at all. Human existence is taken for granted virtually all the time, of course, it is the greatest of our complacencies, but experiences of wonder can jolt us into the realisation of how remarkable not only our own but all existence actually is –
Why anything? Why not nothing
? – and an arresting illustration of this was given by Ralph Waldo
Emerson at the start of his essay,
Nature
, with a flight of fancy as charming as it is vivid: ‘If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!’

And yet we do not have to glimpse the full glory of the universe to experience wonder: it can be triggered in our personal lives by art (by classical tragedy especially), and by spiritual epiphanies (rare as hen’s teeth now), and more to the purpose here, by aspects of the natural world. Let me give another example. In June 2004 I took my two children, Flora and Seb, on a half-term holiday to a fairly remote Greek island, Alonissos in the Sporades (my wife Jo had to stay behind at the last minute because her father had fallen dangerously ill). Flora was twelve and Seb was just coming up for his eighth birthday, and one morning the three of us joined a trip on an old-fashioned local boat, a kaïki, in the past used for transport and fishing but now pressed into the service of tourism. We were bound for the even remoter island of Kyra Panagia, to visit its ancient monastery and have lunch, and in the sunshine the silvery-blue Aegean was quite unusually still: by the time we were halfway there the surface was as glassy and flat as I have ever seen it, without a ripple or a wavelet, it was a true mirror-calm over which the kaïki dreamily glided in the heat haze, and the dozen of us who were passengers were relaxed by it to the point of sleepiness, when the water next to the boat exploded. A pod of common dolphins, half a dozen of them, suddenly surged out of the sea to look at us and play around us. Every soul on board cried out in amazement and delight, and as we looked on spellbound, they performed an acrobatic display in and out of the water for three or four minutes, all about the boat. Then they simply disappeared, and the sea was flat as a millpond once again.

The whole company was stunned. It was hard to take in exactly what had happened. We seemed to have been subject
to a visitation: these large, strikingly beautiful, fierily energetic creatures had purposely come to see us, out of nowhere, and they seemed to have intelligence, and friendliness, and even an exhilarating sense of fun, and we realised at that moment what increasing numbers of people have realised over the last thirty years or so, from the decks of boats: how singular are the cetaceans – the whales and dolphins – and in particular, how extraordinary they can seem, in their interactions with us. They may be wonder-inducing, above all other animals; and in exploring wonder in nature, they are a good place to start.

The appreciation of their unusual qualities is very recent in the rich industrialised West and represents a fascinating cultural shift, but one not often remarked upon as such, since it is hard to categorise. Under what rubric do we discuss it? Psychology? Zoology? Tourism studies? Whales and dolphins figure strongly in ancient folklore, of course, especially in the legends of peoples who lived near the sea. In Genesis, they were the first animals to be brought forth by the Lord – ‘and God created great whales’ – while for the Greeks, dolphins were among the stars of the natural world, fresco favourites, major mosaic motifs, and the stories of them saving people from the waves figured not only in myths (and on coins) but also in serious history; Herodotus recounts, as something to be believed, the story of Arion the poet, who was tossed overboard by the treacherous sailors of his Corinthian ship and brought to shore by a friendly dolphin. But in the farming and then industrialised culture of modern Europe and America, down the centuries, cetaceans played virtually no part, other than in Herman Melville’s strange and spell-binding
Moby-Dick
(published in 1851 but not widely read before the 1920s), until a series of events in the post-war years brought them out of obscurity and into a new folklore of our own times.

The first was the vogue for performing dolphin shows which swept the rich world from the early 1960s, inspired by the
Hollywood film
Flipper
and its spin-off TV series; at one time there were no fewer than thirty-six dolphinaria, aquariums with dolphins, in Britain alone (by 1993 they were all gone from the UK, but according to a 2014 report, more than 2,000 dolphins, 227 beluga whales, 52 killer whales, 17 false killer whales, and 37 porpoises were still being held in 343 captive facilities in sixty-three countries – I can’t imagine any of them are happy). The second was the emergence, in the 1970s, of new environmental pressure groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, who began campaigning for an end to the commercial hunting of the great whales, with its egregious cruelty, crying out the archetypal slogan of the modern Green movement:
Save the whale!
As a result of these events, cetaceans swam into the modern consciousness, and there they have stayed, growing steadily more prominent because of a third development, the emergence from the 1980s onwards of organised whale watching.

The recreational observation of whales, dolphins, and porpoises in their natural habitat is now a substantial activity across the world: the most recent survey estimated that 13 million people took a whale-watching trip in 2008, and my family and I were among them. For after the visitation on the voyage to Kyra Panagia, we all wanted to see as much of cetaceans as we could, so whenever possible, whale watching was included in holidays. Over the years we managed to get close to Dall’s porpoises and gray whales off the coast of Vancouver Island, to humpback whales off Cape Cod (with the spectacular sight of a humpback breaching, leaping clear of the water), to the bottlenose dolphins of Cardigan Bay (with a mother and calf coming close to the boat), and to a pair of spirited and vivacious common dolphins which had taken up residence in a sea loch in the Scottish Highlands; we have also enjoyed briefer glimpses of harbour porpoises and minke whales.

We were thrilled by them all. From the moment we caught sight of them, we were energised and excited, we thought they
were special, even though we did not have the remarkable experiences of close contact in the water which people can sometimes be blessed with, and which make them feel that whales and dolphins are different in nature from all other non-human animals, and of a higher order, with jaw-dropping characteristics: not only their complete mastery of another world than ours, but their real wish to interact with us, their seeming intelligence, their playfulness, their friendliness and gentleness, their apparent, occasional singling-out for attention of people who are in some way troubled. To read about this in detail, or to talk about it at length, as I have done with Mark Carwardine, the naturalist and TV presenter who knows more about cetaceans than anyone else in Britain, is to enter a sort of no-man’s-land between slowly developing science and rapidly accumulating anecdote. Formal research is making it increasingly clear that cetaceans are indeed exceptional in many ways: to take but two examples of many, dolphins are now known to possess among their vocalisations ‘signature whistles’, in effect personal names, raising the question of whether they also have self-awareness; while some bowhead whales are now believed to live as long as two hundred years, or even more. But it is the encounters with people over the last thirty years, encounters subject to no experimental protocols but often mere haphazard events, which are generating the real wonder and a new folklore. As a scientist who leads whale-watching trips, Mark is in the middle of it; he follows current research closely and is fully aware of the dangers of anthropomorphising, yet after many years of close observation he is in no doubt, for instance, that dolphins ride the bow-waves of boats, not, as some scientists would still maintain, merely as a way of getting from A to B, but simply for fun.

He wrote the world’s best-selling guide to cetaceans; he is the man who presented the celebrated radio series (and subsequent book) about vanishing wildlife,
Last Chance To See
with Douglas Adams, author of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
(and later reprised it as a television series with Stephen Fry). ‘I’ve run hundreds of trips, to see all sorts of animals all over the world, gorillas, elephants, rhinos, tigers, and they all have a big impact on people,’ he said to me. ‘But what I’ve noticed over the years is that whales and dolphins have a different and a greater impact. It’s not just because I’m biased. I’ve seen it time and time again.’ One of the biggest impacts is when he takes people to the San Jacinto lagoon in Baja California in Mexico, where gray whales come down from the Arctic to give birth to their calves, and where in the past they were slaughtered by whalers. Now the females and their calves come up to whale-watching boats to be stroked; and considering the history of the place, the trust they display sometimes leaves the strokers overwhelmed. ‘People can be completely changed by the experience,’ Mark said.

We did not enjoy this sort of intimacy, myself, my wife Jo, and our children Flora and Seb, and yet the whales and dolphins we did see on our trips undoubtedly filled us with a sense of wonder. When I was first trying to analyse why, I was at something of a loss, but a conversation with Flora, the most enthusiastic whale watcher of us all (who was by now twenty-two), opened doors in my mind. She said: ‘They’re like beings from a different dimension.’ I was much taken by this, and we talked about it further, and in the end I asked her to write her thoughts down so I could remember them.