The Wow Factor

Charles Taylor and the Poetic Use of Language; John Taverner, "The Lamb"

If it wasn’t a completely rubbish sounding name, I would have called this whole blog The Wow Factor. I remember when I was at King’s College London, my professor Oliver Davies asking the seminar class if we’d experienced the wow factor when we were reading the set texts for the week. These were the sermons of Meister Eckhart. Now I have to be honest, I hadn’t. And I still don’t really get Meister Eckhart, but I knew what he was talking about. The wow factor is the moment that brings us out of the ordinary flow of experience and elevates us, perhaps for a very short time, to a higher level of consciousness and existence. For me, it’s been a rare thing in life, and often association with art of one form or another. Romantic love does this also I’m sure, but in a different way. You might say that part of the difficulty with love of this type is that is becomes infatuation, which is an ongoing state rather than a momentary elevation. You are stuck in this experience, in other words, and i…