Seeing strangers’ meaningful objects induces a numinous sense of own smallness that precedes grace

Evidence

To leaf through other people’s family photos, to see moments that were of intense emotional significance for them but which mean nothing to you, is, necessarily, to reflect on the times of high drama in your own life, and to achieve a kind of distance that is at once dispassionate and powerfully affecting. That is why the – beautifully, painfully – dilated moment in Tarkovsky’s Stalker where the camera lingers over talismanic objects that were once saturated with meaning, but are now saturated only with water is for me the most moving scene in cinema. It is as if we are seeing the urgencies of our lives through the eyes of an Alien–God. Otto claims that the sense of the numinous is associated with feelings of our own fundamental worthlessness, experienced with a ‘piercing acuteness [and] accompanied by the most uncompromising judgment of self-depreciation’. But, contrary to today’s ego psychology, which hectors us into reinforcing our sense of self (all the better to ‘sell ourselves’), the awareness of our own Nothingness is of course a pre-requisite for a feeling of grace. There is a melancholy dimension to this grace precisely because it involves a radical distanciation from what is ordinarily most important to us. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 362

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains Otto’s numinous and connects worthlessness-feeling to grace, contrary to ego psychology.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s standing interest in hauntology, nostalgia as distance, and melancholy as affecting experience.