Enchantment

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

By Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

I loved fantasy novels as a child — especially the ones where you could get deep into a world. Lord of the Rings, but also Tamora Pierce. I collected glass bottles that looked like they should hold potions. For a while I tended a shrine that someone had built near a moss-covered reservoir, at a park where my family walked every day.

Recently I was looking back through two old photo collections on Pinterest that I must have started in middle school. One was called "The Things in the Dark," the other "That Sunny Life." They evoke strong feelings. The first is dark and moody: train tracks, fog-blanketed forests, dark cafes, dusty books, rooms hung with heavy tapestries, a writing desk, rain falling outside the window. The second is fields of wildflowers, stone walls against windswept grass, ivy-covered country houses, a girl running in a sundress with her face obscured, mismatched crockery. In both, the photos teem with life, and a bit of mystery, a bit of magic. You feel their significance goes beyond the objects in them. Even then, I was still drawn to that feeling. Enchantment.

When I look at my life now, that feeling is largely absent. I live an exciting life, and a very lucky one. But it misses some quality or texture. Everything in my life is what it looks like, and only that. It might look great, but there is no magic, no mystery.

I can still touch it occasionally — when I'm in some emotionally heightened state and want to go home and write, as if I've grabbed a live wire for a second. Or out on a long walk, past wildflowers, with birds and lazy bees and the sun beating down. There's a little extra bit of life there, above and beyond the beauty you'd find in an upscale restaurant or hotel, and that feels so precious.

So how does one get more of it?

One worry is that enchantment is simply collateral damage in the elimination of ignorance — the kind of thing you could only have in a less-explored time, when there were more unknowns. Map the ocean and you learn there are no sea monsters. Study the brain chemistry of attraction and you can dull the enchantment of love. As we understand the world better, we close the gaps where magical explanations used to live. If that is all enchantment is, then scientific progress can only keep draining it, and our already disenchanted world will grow more so.

(Of course, perhaps it is a problem of looking. Some find enchantment in science. As Marilynne Robinson wrote:

“The idea that the physical and spiritual cannot abide together…is a notion that would be considered absurd by a truly theological age. "O ye of little faith." Let [the religious] subscribe to Scientific American for a year and then tell me if their sense of the grandeur of God is not greatly enlarged by what they learned from it…. Nature is a shining garment in which God is revealed and concealed.” 

“It seems to me very amazing that the arbitrarily selected physical world we inhabit is coherent and lawful. An older vocabulary would offer the word "miraculous." … an earlier generation might see divine providence in the fact of a world coherent enough to be experienced by us as complete in itself and as a basis upon which all claims to reality can be tested. A truly theological age would see in this divine Provident intent on making a human habitation within the wild roar of the cosmos.”)

Enchantment isn't inherently about ignorance, though it can be supported by ignorance. Enchantment is really about meaning — about things signifying more than they appear. A tree is not just a tree, it is a spirit. Laying a rock by the fountain is not just laying a rock, it is making a wish, saying a prayer. Science can chase these meanings out — the tree is not a spirit, the rock does nothing — but only to the extent that they are false.

Which raises a stranger possibility. You could try to construct a world where enchantment was simply true: where certain rituals really did affect outcomes, where more agencies and entities were sprinkled through things, where some grand design overlay everything. As we remake more and more of the world with technology, I would rather we design enchantment in than let it drain away. 

But maybe enchantment can't be built. Maybe it requires there to be no human constructor — maybe knowing you placed the magic there yourself is enough to dissolve it. If that is true, then we face a fork. Either we already live in an enchanted world, one that science will never fully strip away, and perhaps that science or technology could even further reveal. Or we do not — and then we can delay the discovery, but not prevent it.

People do seem to crave magic. People seem to need mystery and ritual. That was something I loved in Japan: as you wander through the dense streets of Tokyo, you stumble into shrines. You cross a busy intersection and then notice the bright red gate. You step inside, and there, in the middle of the city, is a pocket of peace. Commuters stand in front of the shrine and toss coins or bow. 

Shintoism seems a religion that is particularly conducive to what humans want out of a religion. The idea of gods for any given life situation, gods that inhabit locations or objects, gods that welcome gifts. Almost 50% of Japan identifies as Shinto. And around 80% visit a shrine at New Years. Shintoism also doesn’t exclude participation in other religions. 

I love shrines because they are a physical invitation to reflect on what matters to you -- on what you want, on how you are behaving. They also invite you to ponder something greater than yourself, namely whatever entity you are imploring. 

Why do we crave enchantment at all? Maybe it is a reaction to death — the feeling that all of this must mean more than it appears, that we are part of something larger. Maybe we evolved to detect agencies (predators, prey, fellow humans), and now find them everywhere, even where there are none: spirits, demons, gods, fairies. Calling it a psychological coping mechanism or misfiring pattern recognition disenchants enchantment, but they are the likeliest “scientific” explanations. 

Of course, neither come close to capturing the sensation of enchantment, something additional to color or sound, some resonance. That when I look at some image I sense some other presence there. That is the sensation that would make someone pause at a shrine, fall to their knees in a church. 

And there is, of course, one more explanation: that we are drawn to enchantment because the world really is enchanted. Because it is true.