A very interesting essay and comments, and I will fight the temptation to write a whole pile of words about nature and stressful lives. So instead at this moment I wonder if we even always want to experience epiphanies. We want to see reality and be able to know everything, but epiphanies are not necessarily blissful experiences. Sometimes having a revelatory flash of the essential nature of something is not so fun. I am reminded of a neuroscientist friend who told me that sometimes not being aware, or sometimes having the ability to live in denial, are some of our most beneficial coping skills!
Steve, this is a fascinating point. It makes me wonder whether one can have a "bad" epiphany, or if revelations of that kind deserve a separate category? I suppose sudden comprehension could have chilling effects, depending on the topic. This is where the academic in me wants to define our terms more precisely. Epiphany in a religious context pertains to the recognition of Christ's divinity by the Magi (I believe). I suppose prophetic visions, like Jonah's, might be biblical versions of negative epiphanies (and Jonah did his best to avoid that particular revelation). But would any theologians use Jonah as an example of epiphany? I don't think so. Similarly, the neuroscientists I cite in this piece limit their discussion of epiphany to problem solving that can be measured (like the remote associates problems). In that case, there are no unnerving surprises when one discovers the correct answer, so sudden insight is always positive. I'm trying to think of example of what you describe, where someone is actively trying to solve a problem, and the breakthrough is more terrifying than joyful. Maybe you can suggest a scenario? Modernists looked at the devastation that technology had wrought and drew some very depressing conclusions about truth and reality. But I'm not sure that they regarded those as epiphanies? Maybe Kevin LaTorre can help us out here with his Joyce references.
I love everything in this essay. And epiphanies are a topic I return to frequently. Last January I published my poem “Regarding Epiphany” on my Substack, which echoes some of your intersections here. The eureka may feel flashing and quick yet rarely (if ever?) happens without the proper setting- the work that gets us to the place or state where an epiphany can occur.
This reminds me of a conversation I had decades ago, with a friend who is a Yogi, when I declared there was simply no way that I could meditate and reach the contemplative peace I longed for, while still living in the city. She reproached me saying That surely it would not truly be peace that I reached if I could not do it in the midst of chaos.  that bothered me and I still disagree with her. I needed the wide open spaces of Idaho, I needed time, and quiet, to discover so much about myself that I really do believe would’ve remained hidden in another setting. Epiphanies occur from fertile soil. And distraction. Plant the seed, water it, then turn your attention to another part of the garden or relax in the yard.
Glad it landed. I was speaking to someone yesterday who was rather indifferent to epiphanies, which I found rather astounding. Maybe it takes a certain spiritual or academic bent to care about these AHA moments? Certainly I spent a lot of years trying to help students experience those kinds of moments. I didn't have space to explore this here, but I'm not the first to point out how ill-suited most educational environments are for fostering creative thought. Cramped quarters might be fine for more precise, fact-driven thinking, but they stifle free association. Classrooms are made to fit all disciplines, but I wonder about a neuroscience experiment in which students spent half of the semester in a more traditional classroom (white walls, whiteboard or projector screen) and then another half in a more expansive learning environment, like an amphitheater or auditorium or vaulted sanctuary. I'm not the person to think about how to measure the differences in thinking or learning in those two spaces, but one would think that it ought to make a difference. I've often thought, during conferences or all-day workshops, about how enervating it is for many students to spend so much of their day seated. The ability to move, to redirect attention in that way, also has profound cognitive benefits that are often foreign to the traditional classroom.
Your yogi friend makes me think of my mentor, Ted Kooser, who has a Proustian idea of awakening. If one can learn to awake within the familiar, he says, one need never leave home. Certainly I found that true in the Midwest: the heart can be filled anyplace with enough effort. But wide open spaces, and landscapes that feel like home, certainly make that easier. My spiritual home will always be the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, where I worked as a ranger. So much space, such simplicity. I wonder at times if the nature lover in me is just an escapist or if there's just a certain kind of wiring for wildness that some of us have.
I've enjoyed reading these comments about epiphanies, especially Joyce's use of them in his short stories and how they might work. Sometimes the epiphany that comes for the reader is not the same one that comes for the main character in the story; in fact, sometimes we might wonder if the main character really understands what has happened. Araby is pretty explicit, but Gabriel in The Dead, or Eveline in Eveline, hmm, not so sure. And this brings me to the question about "bad" epiphanies. Is the recognition that one has been wrong all along, with the full weight of that existential reality decending on them, a "bad" illumination, a negative showing forth? I suppose it might be if it doesn't result in any change. We understand the full weight of Gabriel's death, but does he? Of course, we, as readers of fiction can do something about our life, but a fictive character is stuck like a fly in amber.
This is fantastic, Walter, and ought to be part of today's discussion thread. I'm kind of ping-ponging back and forth between that and these comments today. I believe what you describe in Joyce is dramatic irony -- plenty of that in Shakespeare, too -- where the reader understand more than the characters do. You now have me wondering about the relationship between epiphany and irony -- certainly many epiphanies are ironic.
In the Friday thread I referenced Kate Chopin's The Awakening, but two other examples come from "Desiree's Baby" and "The Story of an Hour." In "Desiree's Baby," Armand Aubigny blames his wife Desiree when their child appears to be part Black. But after she disappears, presumably drowning herself and her baby in the bayou, Armand finds a letter from his mother to his father while burning everything that reminds him of Desiree. The letter says, "But, above all, night and day, I thank the good God for having so arranged our lives that our dear Armand will never know that his mother, who adores him, belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery." A rather classic example of tragic irony. A bad epiphany for Armand, but possibly a good one for the reader, who can examine their own prejudice?
In "The Story of an Hour," Louise Mallard hears the news of her husband's death in a railroad accident and feels exhilarated by her sudden freedom. She spends an hour basking in the glow of this awakening, only to be surprised by her husband's arrival home. He apparently was nowhere near the crash and is very much alive. She dies of surprise, and the reader alone recognizes the falsity of the doctor's conclusion that "she had died of heart disease--of the joy that kills."
So perhaps Joyce did not invent the epiphanic ending in short fiction after all?
Super post, Joshua. It's also interesting to look at Joyce's contribution to the form of the short story: ending in an epiphany. Virtually all the stories in __Dubliners_ work this way. Most notable of course is "The Dead". ~Mary
Great point. Kevin LaTorre mentioned Joyce as well (we've been having a little debate about whether there can be such a thing as a "bad" or negative epiphany). I'm embarrassed to say that I'm only vaguely familiar with Joyce beyond A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and "Araby."
Joshua, one of the amazing things that Joyce did was to actually change the way a story reaches its climax: Most, if not all the short stories, in _Dubliners_ end with an epiphany in the last line of the story. We don't necessarily see "resolution", but we for sure see discovery--and a certain sense of an open-ended moment.
Thank you for the meditation on what the epiphany is, not only in natural settings but also in the brain and in art. Those are tricky threads to braid, and you did it well!
Another note on places / definitions of epiphanies: the novelist James Joyce wrote down his own Eureka moments in urban and mundane spaces, early in his career. Naturally, he defined them more rigorously with time: "“a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself....it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments," if this modernist definition helps at all. For more, here's a deeper dive: https://library.buffalo.edu/jamesjoyce/catalog/i-epiphanies
I am not as familiar with Joyce's epiphanies, but that is a great addition to the conversation. It makes me wonder how he, as a modernist, defined a spiritual manifestation. Certainly the spontaneity of a Eureka moment feels preternatural. But as a humanist I tend to think of all advanced forms of cognition as physiological. I remember losing consciousness once while suffering heat stroke, during my first season as a wilderness ranger, and remembering afterward how impossible it was to feel shame at my sorry state. There is also Michael Pollan's recent work on hallucinogenic drugs, many of which seem to simulate epiphanies. Or does an LSD trip or a dose of magic mushrooms conjure the real thing? Rather afield of your original comment :)
Josh, my Dad used to joke that he had a powerful, unique brain that always operated at 100% capacity. The downside, he said, was that to learn any thing new, something had to be discarded, and he had no control over what went into the discard pile. So I wonder, was Dad's unique physiology capable of reverse epiphanies? heehee
Kevin, I'm curious about your thoughts on my friend Steve's comment above about "bad" epiphanies. Am I right that epiphany is nearly always positive in a religious context, specifically within Judeo-Christian tradition? Were there any epiphanies among those you mentioned in Joyce's notebook that might have been more terrifying or baleful than uplifting?
I'd agree that epiphanies are religious experiences, and I'll fully admit my Judeo-Christian bias in my outlooks. The "negative epiphany" is also a concept I'd support, since it sounds like a very very concentrated pinpoint of utter depression. Y'all were discussing Jonah as a biblical example of the negative epiphany, but I'd point to Job 37 where God speaks in response to Job and his friends' debates. That instance a) solves the problem being posed, of God's culpability, b) gives the external stimulus of a "Eureka!" moment, and c) changes Job's outlook forever (likely with both fear and joy).
As to Joyce - his epiphanies are discreet in his journals, not always defined as realizations, and often recorded without much commentary. However, in his "Dubliners" collection, most of the final epiphanic moments he gives characters are certainly negative or baleful insights: the boy's failed despair at the end of "Araby," Eveline's total inaction on the dock at the end of "Eveline," and (most famously) Gabriel's mournful realization—his own emotional inadequacy—at the end of "The Dead." Does that help?
Job is an interesting example, too. Maybe a question to save for Friday's thread, but I'm still wondering if all revelations are necessarily epiphanic. Mary Tabor mentioned the epiphanic ending as one of Joyce's innovations in the short story form, and I do think Joyce's notion of epiphany was quite different from the Archimedes model. My most recent article explores a Cather novel that was too complicated to reference in a Substack post. The main character, Lucy Gayheart, has often been thought to have experienced failed epiphanies -- either illusory flashes of insight or moments of transcendence that were incomplete due to flaws in her artistic makeup. I debunk those readings (I think) using Kounios and others. But I'm mindful also of illnesses like schizophrenia, which predispose some to paranoia and conspiracy theories. The cliched paranoiac with a wall littered with newspaper clippings, photographs, and arrows showing the illusory patterns that connect them certainly imagines himself to be experiencing breakthroughs. I don't think that's what we're talking about, but art is subjective enough to make me uncertain where epiphany ends and other false imitations or variations on sudden insight begin.
A very interesting essay and comments, and I will fight the temptation to write a whole pile of words about nature and stressful lives. So instead at this moment I wonder if we even always want to experience epiphanies. We want to see reality and be able to know everything, but epiphanies are not necessarily blissful experiences. Sometimes having a revelatory flash of the essential nature of something is not so fun. I am reminded of a neuroscientist friend who told me that sometimes not being aware, or sometimes having the ability to live in denial, are some of our most beneficial coping skills!
Steve, this is a fascinating point. It makes me wonder whether one can have a "bad" epiphany, or if revelations of that kind deserve a separate category? I suppose sudden comprehension could have chilling effects, depending on the topic. This is where the academic in me wants to define our terms more precisely. Epiphany in a religious context pertains to the recognition of Christ's divinity by the Magi (I believe). I suppose prophetic visions, like Jonah's, might be biblical versions of negative epiphanies (and Jonah did his best to avoid that particular revelation). But would any theologians use Jonah as an example of epiphany? I don't think so. Similarly, the neuroscientists I cite in this piece limit their discussion of epiphany to problem solving that can be measured (like the remote associates problems). In that case, there are no unnerving surprises when one discovers the correct answer, so sudden insight is always positive. I'm trying to think of example of what you describe, where someone is actively trying to solve a problem, and the breakthrough is more terrifying than joyful. Maybe you can suggest a scenario? Modernists looked at the devastation that technology had wrought and drew some very depressing conclusions about truth and reality. But I'm not sure that they regarded those as epiphanies? Maybe Kevin LaTorre can help us out here with his Joyce references.
I love everything in this essay. And epiphanies are a topic I return to frequently. Last January I published my poem “Regarding Epiphany” on my Substack, which echoes some of your intersections here. The eureka may feel flashing and quick yet rarely (if ever?) happens without the proper setting- the work that gets us to the place or state where an epiphany can occur.
This reminds me of a conversation I had decades ago, with a friend who is a Yogi, when I declared there was simply no way that I could meditate and reach the contemplative peace I longed for, while still living in the city. She reproached me saying That surely it would not truly be peace that I reached if I could not do it in the midst of chaos.  that bothered me and I still disagree with her. I needed the wide open spaces of Idaho, I needed time, and quiet, to discover so much about myself that I really do believe would’ve remained hidden in another setting. Epiphanies occur from fertile soil. And distraction. Plant the seed, water it, then turn your attention to another part of the garden or relax in the yard.
Cheers for a good read and for all epiphanies!
Glad it landed. I was speaking to someone yesterday who was rather indifferent to epiphanies, which I found rather astounding. Maybe it takes a certain spiritual or academic bent to care about these AHA moments? Certainly I spent a lot of years trying to help students experience those kinds of moments. I didn't have space to explore this here, but I'm not the first to point out how ill-suited most educational environments are for fostering creative thought. Cramped quarters might be fine for more precise, fact-driven thinking, but they stifle free association. Classrooms are made to fit all disciplines, but I wonder about a neuroscience experiment in which students spent half of the semester in a more traditional classroom (white walls, whiteboard or projector screen) and then another half in a more expansive learning environment, like an amphitheater or auditorium or vaulted sanctuary. I'm not the person to think about how to measure the differences in thinking or learning in those two spaces, but one would think that it ought to make a difference. I've often thought, during conferences or all-day workshops, about how enervating it is for many students to spend so much of their day seated. The ability to move, to redirect attention in that way, also has profound cognitive benefits that are often foreign to the traditional classroom.
Your yogi friend makes me think of my mentor, Ted Kooser, who has a Proustian idea of awakening. If one can learn to awake within the familiar, he says, one need never leave home. Certainly I found that true in the Midwest: the heart can be filled anyplace with enough effort. But wide open spaces, and landscapes that feel like home, certainly make that easier. My spiritual home will always be the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, where I worked as a ranger. So much space, such simplicity. I wonder at times if the nature lover in me is just an escapist or if there's just a certain kind of wiring for wildness that some of us have.
I've enjoyed reading these comments about epiphanies, especially Joyce's use of them in his short stories and how they might work. Sometimes the epiphany that comes for the reader is not the same one that comes for the main character in the story; in fact, sometimes we might wonder if the main character really understands what has happened. Araby is pretty explicit, but Gabriel in The Dead, or Eveline in Eveline, hmm, not so sure. And this brings me to the question about "bad" epiphanies. Is the recognition that one has been wrong all along, with the full weight of that existential reality decending on them, a "bad" illumination, a negative showing forth? I suppose it might be if it doesn't result in any change. We understand the full weight of Gabriel's death, but does he? Of course, we, as readers of fiction can do something about our life, but a fictive character is stuck like a fly in amber.
This is fantastic, Walter, and ought to be part of today's discussion thread. I'm kind of ping-ponging back and forth between that and these comments today. I believe what you describe in Joyce is dramatic irony -- plenty of that in Shakespeare, too -- where the reader understand more than the characters do. You now have me wondering about the relationship between epiphany and irony -- certainly many epiphanies are ironic.
In the Friday thread I referenced Kate Chopin's The Awakening, but two other examples come from "Desiree's Baby" and "The Story of an Hour." In "Desiree's Baby," Armand Aubigny blames his wife Desiree when their child appears to be part Black. But after she disappears, presumably drowning herself and her baby in the bayou, Armand finds a letter from his mother to his father while burning everything that reminds him of Desiree. The letter says, "But, above all, night and day, I thank the good God for having so arranged our lives that our dear Armand will never know that his mother, who adores him, belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery." A rather classic example of tragic irony. A bad epiphany for Armand, but possibly a good one for the reader, who can examine their own prejudice?
In "The Story of an Hour," Louise Mallard hears the news of her husband's death in a railroad accident and feels exhilarated by her sudden freedom. She spends an hour basking in the glow of this awakening, only to be surprised by her husband's arrival home. He apparently was nowhere near the crash and is very much alive. She dies of surprise, and the reader alone recognizes the falsity of the doctor's conclusion that "she had died of heart disease--of the joy that kills."
So perhaps Joyce did not invent the epiphanic ending in short fiction after all?
Super post, Joshua. It's also interesting to look at Joyce's contribution to the form of the short story: ending in an epiphany. Virtually all the stories in __Dubliners_ work this way. Most notable of course is "The Dead". ~Mary
Great point. Kevin LaTorre mentioned Joyce as well (we've been having a little debate about whether there can be such a thing as a "bad" or negative epiphany). I'm embarrassed to say that I'm only vaguely familiar with Joyce beyond A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and "Araby."
Joshua, one of the amazing things that Joyce did was to actually change the way a story reaches its climax: Most, if not all the short stories, in _Dubliners_ end with an epiphany in the last line of the story. We don't necessarily see "resolution", but we for sure see discovery--and a certain sense of an open-ended moment.
Thank you for the meditation on what the epiphany is, not only in natural settings but also in the brain and in art. Those are tricky threads to braid, and you did it well!
Another note on places / definitions of epiphanies: the novelist James Joyce wrote down his own Eureka moments in urban and mundane spaces, early in his career. Naturally, he defined them more rigorously with time: "“a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself....it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments," if this modernist definition helps at all. For more, here's a deeper dive: https://library.buffalo.edu/jamesjoyce/catalog/i-epiphanies
I am not as familiar with Joyce's epiphanies, but that is a great addition to the conversation. It makes me wonder how he, as a modernist, defined a spiritual manifestation. Certainly the spontaneity of a Eureka moment feels preternatural. But as a humanist I tend to think of all advanced forms of cognition as physiological. I remember losing consciousness once while suffering heat stroke, during my first season as a wilderness ranger, and remembering afterward how impossible it was to feel shame at my sorry state. There is also Michael Pollan's recent work on hallucinogenic drugs, many of which seem to simulate epiphanies. Or does an LSD trip or a dose of magic mushrooms conjure the real thing? Rather afield of your original comment :)
Josh, my Dad used to joke that he had a powerful, unique brain that always operated at 100% capacity. The downside, he said, was that to learn any thing new, something had to be discarded, and he had no control over what went into the discard pile. So I wonder, was Dad's unique physiology capable of reverse epiphanies? heehee
Kevin, I'm curious about your thoughts on my friend Steve's comment above about "bad" epiphanies. Am I right that epiphany is nearly always positive in a religious context, specifically within Judeo-Christian tradition? Were there any epiphanies among those you mentioned in Joyce's notebook that might have been more terrifying or baleful than uplifting?
I'd agree that epiphanies are religious experiences, and I'll fully admit my Judeo-Christian bias in my outlooks. The "negative epiphany" is also a concept I'd support, since it sounds like a very very concentrated pinpoint of utter depression. Y'all were discussing Jonah as a biblical example of the negative epiphany, but I'd point to Job 37 where God speaks in response to Job and his friends' debates. That instance a) solves the problem being posed, of God's culpability, b) gives the external stimulus of a "Eureka!" moment, and c) changes Job's outlook forever (likely with both fear and joy).
As to Joyce - his epiphanies are discreet in his journals, not always defined as realizations, and often recorded without much commentary. However, in his "Dubliners" collection, most of the final epiphanic moments he gives characters are certainly negative or baleful insights: the boy's failed despair at the end of "Araby," Eveline's total inaction on the dock at the end of "Eveline," and (most famously) Gabriel's mournful realization—his own emotional inadequacy—at the end of "The Dead." Does that help?
Job is an interesting example, too. Maybe a question to save for Friday's thread, but I'm still wondering if all revelations are necessarily epiphanic. Mary Tabor mentioned the epiphanic ending as one of Joyce's innovations in the short story form, and I do think Joyce's notion of epiphany was quite different from the Archimedes model. My most recent article explores a Cather novel that was too complicated to reference in a Substack post. The main character, Lucy Gayheart, has often been thought to have experienced failed epiphanies -- either illusory flashes of insight or moments of transcendence that were incomplete due to flaws in her artistic makeup. I debunk those readings (I think) using Kounios and others. But I'm mindful also of illnesses like schizophrenia, which predispose some to paranoia and conspiracy theories. The cliched paranoiac with a wall littered with newspaper clippings, photographs, and arrows showing the illusory patterns that connect them certainly imagines himself to be experiencing breakthroughs. I don't think that's what we're talking about, but art is subjective enough to make me uncertain where epiphany ends and other false imitations or variations on sudden insight begin.
Failed epiphanies is definitely a concept I want to see in tomorrow's thread, I'll bookmark it. Thanks!