Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

by Katherine May

The last decade has filled so many of us with a growing sense of unreality. We seem trapped in a grind of constant change without ever getting the chance to integrate it. Those rolling news cycles, the chatter on social media, the way that our families have split along partisan lines: it feels as though we’ve undergone a halving, then a quartering, and now we are some kind of social rubble.

We feel it most keenly when we reach for the language of grief but find only platitudes, when we hurl the darkest wastes of our experience out into the ether and find no one willing to catch them. Something has been lost here, vanished beyond living memory: a fluency in the experiences that have patterned humanity since we began.

Constantly surrounded by conversation, we are nevertheless chronically lonely.

I’m seeking what the poet John Keats called negative capability, that intuitive mode of thought that allows us to reside in “uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” The subtle magic of the world offers comfort, but I don’t know how to receive it.

Enchantment is small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory. It relies on small doses of awe, almost homeopathic: those quiet traces of fascination that are found only when we look for them.

Enchantment came so easily to me as a child, but I wrongly thought it was small, parochial, a shameful thing to be put away in the rush towards adulthood. Now I wonder how I can find it again.

But enchantment cannot be destroyed. It waits patiently for us to remember that we need it.

That is what I am searching for: the chance to merge into the wild drift of the world, to feel overcome, to enter into its weft so completely that sometimes I can forget myself.

Burnout comes when you spend too long ignoring your own needs. It is an incremental sickening that builds from exhaustion upon exhaustion, overwhelm upon overwhelm.

I feel my attention settling for the first time in a long while, in this place that is infinite with detail, with layers and layers of life arrayed before my eyes. It occurs to me that I am resting. It is not the same as doing nothing. Resting like this is something active, chosen, alert, something rare and precious.

Sometimes I push my thumb into an orange just for the scent of it, and it takes me there: the peace, the spaciousness of an unhurried afternoon, the quality of attention to small things.

Mircea Eliade coined the term hierophany to describe the way that the divine reveals itself to us, transforming the objects through which it works. When we make a tree or a stone or a wafer of bread the subject of our worshipful attention, we transform it into a hierophany, an object of the sacred.

For the believer, this means that absolute reality has been uncovered, rather than anything fantastical projected upon it. Hierophany is the experience of perceiving all the layers of ...

Childhood used to have dirt under its fingernails. Now it has hand sanitiser. So much of what we give to our children is shallow terrain: the shiny plastic surfaces of soft play centres and toys whose purpose is so specific that they run out of joy after a few minutes. Shallow terrain has nothing under its surface. It is the same primary colour all the way through. It has nothing to explore or investigate, nothing to modify or fix.

In Orwell’s Roses, Rebecca Solnit shares the Etruscan word saeculum, which describes “the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years.” This can be understood as living memory, the extent of contact we have with each passing era. “Every event has its saeculum,” says Solnit, “and then its sunset.”

Spend half a day on the beach and you will know its soft power, the way it creeps up on you. I like to step down a little farther on from the solid edge of the shore, into the place that will soon be inundated. The intertidal zone, that most liminal of spaces.

tides are gravity made visible.

High tides happen when the moon is close, and when she is far away, and low tides occur in the spaces between.

A part of me is always suspicious of groups. I am by nature a solitary animal. I like to do things my way, and in my own good time. I’m resistant to timetables and demands on my attention, and to the kind of politics that always seem to arise between adults who join clubs. I hate organised fun. Overall, I prefer to make my own ad hoc arrangements with a couple of close friends.

The black bowl of the sky was suddenly full of sparks, a thousand at a time, all drawing silvery lines like the ribs of a celestial umbrella.

We are more moth than we know: small, frustrated, capable of only tickling a world that we wish would feel our heft. We share that attraction towards the brightest object in our field of view, an equal fascination with candles and conflagrations. We sense the danger, but we can’t look away. In fact we are drawn to circle it endlessly, getting closer and closer until it consumes us. Even when we think the sky might be falling, we stay to watch. It is elemental to us, this alertness, this panicked, flitting attention.

Fire is the shadow side of enchantment, the dark, gleaming sorcery from which we can’t tear our gaze. It shows us the wild danger that still resides in nature, the power it retains to devour and destroy.

I have begun to notice this malady in other people, too. I have been asking, slyly, for recommendations that would rekindle my passion, and nobody seems to know. Those literary friends of mine—those other readers, my people, who usually fizz with excitement about one book or another—are drawing a blank. “What have you read that’s good lately?” I ask. They shrug. They prevaricate. They say that such-and-such was okay, but they didn’t really love it. They ask if I can suggest something in return. I cannot. It seems to me that it perpetuates itself, this exchange of nothing. Behind it is an existential exhaustion, the sickness, the fear, the lockdowns, the stretching of the human mind past its capacity to manage. We have been running on empty for so long that we’ve lost the urge to refuel. We have spent so long anxiously scanning the news that we are now in a fixed state of objectless checking. This is our reading matter now. We are not looking for anything, we are just looking. It seems that if we stop looking, something terrible could happen. Looking is our magical thinking. It used to feel protective, but now it’s turned dark. Now, if we don’t check, if we don’t perpetually look over our shoulder, we suspect we might bring about disaster. The last thing propping up the sky is our eternal vigilance.

Perhaps I shouldn’t fear this present-day burnout after all. It shows me only that I’m ready to be made again. How have I allowed this great pleasure in my life—the act of sitting quietly with a book and drinking in its words—to become so heavy, so freighted with obligation? Somewhere along the line, I lost the sense of playfulness that drew me towards it in the first place. No wonder my reading went on strike.

I can always meditate on trains, but never in planes. It is not a simple matter of movement. It is instead about contact. Mid-air, my attention has nowhere to sink—just an unsteady void below, seven miles of nothing. Up here, I cannot put down roots. I am in transit, in a state between two solidities. Flying feels like an intermission in the real business of living.

The Brocken Spectre is a ghost of our own making, a literal projection of the dark part of our self onto an unstable surface.

We have run as far as we can from the hardships of previous ages, and now we need to find a balance between what we know and what we knew.

We find this absolute connectedness hard to grasp. We often prefer to forget it. We often push back against it. But it is there, real as sunlight, behind everything we do. Since it is too big for us to swallow whole, we approach it through metaphor. We tell stories about monsters and magic and elemental gods, but really we are finding a way to understand.

In medieval philosophy, the earth was made of four elements—earth, water, fire, and air—but the vast universe beyond it was composed of a different substance entirely. This was aether, a particularly refined material that transcended the states we recognise. Known as the quintessence, it was neither hot nor cold, neither wet nor dry, and was capable of changing its density. It was the stuff from which stars were made, and light, and gravity. It tended naturally towards circular motion and so set the orbits of the planets.

Our love of electric light is leaching some of the wonder from the world. If I want to see a meteor storm—and I do—then I’ll need to travel.

Stones added to ancient sites of ritual suggest to me that there’s a continuity of practice at play, a river of meaning that has flowed through the centuries. Leaving a trace is not necessarily the same as doing harm, especially when it merely involves the shifting of stones from one place to another. Making these connections will surely usher us into more careful stewardship of the land on which we walk.

We don’t destroy colonial attitudes about the landscape by erasing people from it altogether, and forbidding their ever-morphing acts of meaning-making. We don’t preserve our natural landscapes by turning them into a museum. We heal these rifts by inviting back gentleness into our relationship with the earth, by allowing meaning to take hold again. We should encourage enchantment to bolt like a weed. It is, after all, native here. The stones, and the dried-out heather, and the sound of the sea, and the moon above our heads have all been storing it like a battery, waiting for its current to be found again.

Night is already a shadow cast on the side of the earth that has turned away from the sun. This is a shadow within a shadow, a fragile thing made by moonlight.