Nature's beauty

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower ...
--Blake

That photograph of the Himalayas that I added to yesterday's posting keeps drawing me back. It reminds me of something that I'm apt to forget, sitting here at home -- how incredibly beautiful are the Himalayas, how overpowering their presence when they surround you.

This sensation of being overawed by natural beauty can be almost religious in its intensity. It's easy to understand how pagans, experiencing this ecstasy in the wilderness, were led to believe in great unseen gods living atop their mountains. Christian theologians suggest that the beauty of nature is a pale reflection of the beauty of God himself, our souls' foretaste of heaven.

And yet, when you try to analyze the experience, it tends to evaporate. What are these mountains? Just protuberances of the earth's crust, either uplifted by tectonic collisions, like the Himalayas, or by volcanic action, like Mt. Rainier -- protuberances covered by layers of water in its opaque, solid phase. Interesting scientifically, certainly, but why "beautiful"? Why "awe-inspiring"? Whence this feeling of being so moved, at times, that you feel almost heartbroken?

The beauty is not inherent in the mountains themselves, is it? It somehow exists within our brains. But our brains evolved through natural selection. What was the evolutionary value of developing a sense of beauty? Does aesthetic appreciation help us seek food or avoid danger? Does it help us attract mates and reproduce? Not so far as we can tell.

Some anthropologists have noted that we feel happiest either when we are in an enclosed "cozy" space, or when we are somewhere above our surroundings, some place with a great "view." These sensations, they suggest, may just be displacements of our evolved instincts to find a safe cave and to seek out a viewpoint where we could observe available game and threats from predators. But these familiar but mild sensations -- the comfort of a happy evening at home by the fire, the pleasure of a great view from your living room window -- aren't really what I'm talking about.

Some scientists say that our emotional response to various phenomena of nature --"beautiful!" "awe-inspiring!" -- may be nothing more than useless neurological artifacts left over from the evolution of other, more useful instincts -- perhaps the search for a cave and a view, discussed above, or perhaps qualities related to sexual attraction. They are thus "accidental" parts of our emotional equipment, misfirings of our neurological systems, enjoyable but meaningless from an evolutionary perspective. (Similarly, some scientists suggest that even our sensation of being conscious and self-aware is evolutionarily accidental and meaningless.)

We have no definitive answers. All we know is that beauty is indeed in the eye (brain!) of the beholder, but that we all seem wired to see beauty in similar phenomena -- in high snowy mountains, in wild places, in deep lakes, in waterfalls, in starry skies. It's a mystery, but a mystery that adds much to our human lives.