experiencing awe via the sense of scale
MAY 24, 2026
travel
I went to Jeju Island (제주도), I experienced a lot of awe, mostly by looking at big things.
One such big thing was Seongsan Ilchulbong (성산일출봉, lit. Fortress Mountain Sunrise Peak), the easternmost moutain on Jeju.
Seongsan Ilchulbong does not care for your puny human distances; in fact, it laughs as you try to comprehend it, playing tricks on you in parallax. When I arrived at parking lot at the base of the mountain, I walked hundreds of feet left and right, trying to get a different angle. But while the shops and the ticket booth moved within my field of vision, the mountain stayed stubbornly in place, like it was a photo pasted to the sky. You only ever see the face that it wants you to see.
Maybe it was all just a trick, though — you can actually hike up Seongsan Ilchulbong in a mere half-hour. The top is not a peak; it is a crater, which, despite being (or because it was?) formed by a volcanic eruption, is lined with grass and trees. There is a surprising amount of life — if you look closely, you can watch birds flit in and out of a cluster of pine trees, or say hi to the cat. (I'm not sure whether she actually lives there or not).
But trying to look at the crater in full is a bit of a fool's errand. It is much like peering into a bowl, except that the bowl belongs to a deity who uses the whole ocean as its table.
The sea, of course, inspires its own kind of awe. Jeju is an island, so the sea is never too far away, tucked in the alleyways between village houses. Everywhere you look, you can see the blue paint-stroke that is the sea, and the horizon tasked with bounding it from above.
But catching a glimpse this way is like trying to look at infinitude through a bathroom window. What you really want to do is get up close to the coast. Here, without the frame of the buildings, the sea can embrace you from ear to ear, asserting that it is not just the flat thing beneath the horizon. From up close, you can see that the sea is alive, busy washing the edges off of soju-bottle shards. It must be true that the sea is just as alive further out, otherwise, where would these currents come from? But as you stare off into the distance, the sea emulates a perfect Cartesian plane, waves and ripples smoothed out by sheer scale.
You could be forgiven for thinking that you have actually seen infinity.
Jeju is also famous for its waterfalls — there are three big ones, but my favorite is Cheonjiyeon Waterfall (천지연폭포, lit. the Waterfall Where the Sky Meets the Earth).
It's not my favorite because it's the best waterfall, no, it's more about the surrounding cliffs. They are quite overhung, and the trees on the clifftops defy gravity to grow over your head. Standing beneath them, I felt like an ant in a cathedral — inside in some sense, except that "inside" had no meaning because the thing I was supposedly inside was just too big. The tree canopy was too far above me to give more than the slightest semblance of ceiling-ness, and in being too far above, it melded together with the sky, letting golden-hour sunlight crash through the leaves in fractal stained-glass patterns.
Is it gauche to say that it was beautiful?
But awe doesn't always come in big things. Sometimes it comes in the form of a baby two tables over in the airport food court, trying to make sense of you with her adorable eyes. I waved hi and made a funny face — highly recommend doing so to all babies — and she giggled, thumping her fists on the table. She wiggled her tiny fingers in an effort to wave back, and I was struck by the fact that I used to have fingers that small. I, and everyone that I know, people who are now me-sized or even bigger than me — we all used to be as small as she is now.
And that was its own kind of awe, too.