In a similar way to the assumptions of religion, when we talk about awe and beauty we are speaking of something beyond easy description.
For what place do things like awe and wonder have in the listings of clinical characteristics?
And why should simple time, space, and distance comparisons stir some sort of longing inside of us?
On the opposite end, how can such simple and mundane things with loved ones evoke the same?
And why do we care?
This, again, seems like an issue that is significant because it is always “by a person or about a person.”
They are in the nature of an interpretation man gives to the universe, or an impression he gets from it; and just as no enumeration of the physical qualities of a beautiful object could ever include its beauty, or give the faintest hint of what we mean by beauty to a creature without aesthetic experience, so no factual description of any human environment could include the uncanny and the Numinous or even hint at them. There seem, in fact, to be only two views we can hold about awe. Either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function, yet showing no tendency to disappear from that mind at its fullest development in poet, philosopher, or saint: or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the name Revelation might properly be given.
-C.S. Lewis, The Problem Of Pain (Amazon)
