Dread mingled with veneration

Awe, space travel & Captain Kirk

“Earthrise”. Pic: William Anders, 1968

In the most recent episode of the Conversations with Tyler podcast, Tyler Cowan spoke with the British science writer Philip Ball. I’d recommend the podcast generally, and this episode specifically, even if Ball hadn’t mentioned William Shatner’s 2021 sub-orbital journey, and the actor’s sense of dread once he glimpsed the black and depthless hostility of space.

But Shatner’s thoughts, shared in his 2022 memoir, had fascinated me too. Not least, as Ball mentioned, for its invocation of a very old and profound conception of awe. I wrote about it at the time, and include it here, in slightly edited fashion.

William Shatner was awed, and not pleasantly. He was stricken by what he’d seen. Terrified and depleted. In 2021, the former Star Trek actor joined the second sub-orbital tourist flight of the Jeff Bezos rocket New Shepard, and became the oldest man to have ever gone to space.

Upon his return, Shatner was giddy. “I hope I never recover from this,” he said. “I’m so filled with emotion about what just happened. It’s extraordinary, extraordinary.”

Which felt sincere, but perhaps a free ticket to space obliges nothing less than enthusiasm for it. Because in his memoir, released the following year, he described a vastly different experience. “My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral,” Shatner wrote. “I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses … but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold … all I saw was death.”

This wasn’t awe as we usually know it. There was no grateful astonishment. No breathless reverence. There was not the exhilarating smallness – the thrilling vacation of ego – that you sense when facing something immeasurably grander than yourself.

No. It was terror. William Shatner had felt the awful condescension of infinity and the implacable hostility of space. He had seen the void, had tasted the richest and most nullifying darkness. Captain James T. Kirk had boldly gone where few had gone before – and he saw… death.

Shatner’s awe was ancient, biblical. This was the awe of Job when God permits Satan to murder his children to test his faith. “It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered,” Shatner writes. “The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness.”

This was awe as defined by the social psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, when they drew upon the word’s medieval roots: “Dread mingled with veneration, reverential or respectful fear; and the attitude of a mind subdued to profound reverence in the presence of supreme authority, moral greatness or sublimity, or mysterious sacredness.”

This might be closer to the awe that Oppenheimer felt when watching the first atomic test he helped design, and which he later told us – with suspicious eloquence – had brought to mind these words from Hindu scripture: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

William Shatner was 90 at the time, and perhaps the death he tasted was his own, but we might be grateful for his recovery of “awe” from an earlier and deliciously darker meaning.

As Captain Kirk, commander of the starship Enterprise, Shatner spoke in cloying epithets, like a space-faring FDR delivering endless fireside chats. “You know the greatest danger facing us is ourselves, an irrational fear of the unknown,” is one example. “But there’s no such thing as the unknown – only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood.”

But then Shatner saw the void.     

*

The original Star Trek series ran for only three seasons before poor ratings compelled NBC to kill it. Its star, William Shatner, was relegated to regional tent theatre, and just one month after the show finished Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon. Shatner bitterly watched the landing on his four-inch television in his RV – bitterly because he felt that the early success of Star Trek had buoyed NASA’s Moon budget and, well, now he was a young divorcee with dubious prospects watching this distant adventure from a caravan in a lonely field. He should have been at Cape Canaveral, dammit. “I felt a part of this,” he remembered. “I’m at a very low point watching this high point.”

Meanwhile, in Manhattan, the great British poet W.H. Auden was sat in his filthy apartment, his misanthropy calcifying, his famous drinking and amphetamine-popping accelerating. He saw moral dissolution everywhere – in a 1965 essay, he mused about how one might reduce the world’s population by 90 per cent.

Perhaps the most famous expression of Auden’s late cantankerousness was his poem about the Moon landing. He had been asked to write one by The New York Times, who, believing the moment required something loftier than mere reporting, would run it on the front page. Auden rejected the commission, saying that there was nothing to celebrate, but was sufficiently aroused to write a very different poem – caustic and awesomely petty – which the New Yorker published six weeks after the event. It opened:

It’s natural the Boys should whoop it up for
so huge a phallic triumph, an adventure
it would not have occurred to women
to think worth while, made possible only

because we like huddling in gangs and knowing
the exact time

It’s meaningless, he wrote, but it was also inevitable:

from the moment
the first flint was flaked this landing was merely
a matter of time.

His cranky hauteur finds its peak here:

Worth going to see? I can well believe it.
Worth seeing? Mneh! I once rode through a desert
and was not charmed: give me a watered
lively garden, remote from blatherers

As their tube of honeycombed aluminium sped through space, Michael Collins navigated by sextant while Neil Armstrong carried in his suit a small piece of cloth from the wing of the Wright brothers’ Kitty Hawk. This alone seems romantic to me, and Auden himself had rhapsodised about Homeric adventures in earlier poems, but he didn’t care. It made no claim on his imagination.

For our grouchy speed-freak, the Moon was the province of the poet. It was also Auden’s “Mother, Virgin, Muse” – as he described it in an earlier poem about the Moon – and now his virginal muse had been colonised by American chauvinism, and the obscenity televised live. A place that “has no history” had now been invaded, desecrated and dragged from romantic abstraction into the “squalid mess” of human achievement.

Bummer.

As comically sniffy as Auden was (and defensive of the Moon’s metaphorical powers), I can sympathise with some of his scepticism. As American chauvinism became stickier with blood, its crimes and military follies were justified with speeches not unlike Captain Kirk’s.

And there was craven hypocrisy too. President Richard Nixon – the man who had sabotaged Vietnam peace talks the year before to improve his chances in the election – spoke to the astronauts from the White House, and declared: “Because of what you have done, the heavens have become a part of man’s world. And as you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquillity, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquillity to Earth.”

In the months before the landing, Esquire reporter William Honan asked various celebrities and public figures what they thought the first words spoken on the Moon should be.   

When I asked W.H. Auden what he would like to hear Armstrong say, he replied at first with a mischievous chuckle: “I’ve never done this before!” adding, “What else should he say? It would be a true statement.” But when I went on to ask if he would not prefer something more elevating, perhaps about world peace, he grew sober. “Well, that’s a little different,” Auden said. “We all know that the chief reason for their going there is military, so I don’t think you should ask them to say much about that!”

The last manned voyage to the Moon was in 1972, only three years after the first, but since then space has become intensely commercialised and militarised. This would not have surprised Auden, whose own Moon, until his death the following year, sat defiantly “unsmudged” in the heavens.   

*

William Shatner saw unforgiving darkness, and he saw our lonely rock and grieved for its fragility. In his memoir, he refers to the much-cited “overview effect” to describe the experience:

Essentially, when someone travels to space and views Earth from orbit, a sense of the planet’s fragility takes hold in an ineffable, instinctive manner. Author Frank White first coined the term in 1987: “There are no borders or boundaries on our planet except those that we create in our minds or through human behaviours. All the ideas and concepts that divide us when we are on the surface begin to fade from orbit and the Moon. The result is a shift in worldview, and in identity.”

Despite the cultural popularity of the overview effect, and its repeated invocation in justifying commercial space travel, this “ineffable, instinctive” transformation is not guaranteed (and, if it does occur, the disruption to identity may not be a pleasant one). In a fascinating 2020 paper for Religions journal, anthropologist Deana L. Weibel published her findings from 37 interviews with “space workers”, a group that included nine astronauts. “Alan”, a retired astronaut in his fifties, told her:    

I remember before I flew in space, [two colleagues] spoke very eloquently about [the overview effect] in some of their transmissions from [their shuttle] and so I was aware of it and I was prepared to have a very transformative moment. The first time I looked out at the Earth from space … I even intentionally paused and kind of collected myself and meditated a little bit to kind of clear my head before I opened my eyes and looked out the window for the first time. And I didn’t really feel anything. It’s kind of a letdown. There was nothing. And maybe it’s because I’m not a spiritual person, that’s quite possible … It was a beautiful sight and a unique vantage point, but there was nothing about it that I felt in any way unlocked any kind of philosophical mysteries or spiritual mysteries.

And of experiencing the Moon? Buzz Aldrin described it as a place of “magnificent desolation”, while the pseudonymous astronaut “Zack” described to Weibel its “hostility”. And then there was Bill Anders, a member of Apollo 8 and the man who took the iconic “Earthrise” photo while in lunar orbit, who told The Guardian in 2019: “It didn’t take long for the Moon to become boring. It was like dirty beach sand.” (To be fair, this monotony intensified the contrast with Earth, which provided “the only colour in the universe”.)

To be sure, revelations are enjoyed in space – or even in its contemplation. But Weibel’s paper describes a variety of responses: those whose religious beliefs were strengthened, and those who questioned them. Some atheists had their convictions reinforced; others became more spiritual. Some saw the exquisite loneliness of Earth; others the impossibility that we’re alone. Some were unchanged.

And Shatner? Well, it turns out that the film studios of Culver City hadn’t prepared him well for space. “Everything I had thought was wrong,” he wrote in his memoir. “Everything I had expected to see was wrong. I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things – that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film Contact, when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, ‘They should’ve sent a poet.’ I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us.”