My companion and I, shivering, went out on to an upstairs balcony to watch it. She used the word "awesome" freely while I (a terrible language snob) badly wanted to use it a lot (it teetered on my lips) but mostly suppressed it with smart-arse remarks about how the moon seemed to be hovering above Queanbeyan, about how it, the red, eclipsed moon, had temporarily become a celestial pomegranate.

But for all my smart-arse pomegranatery, I did find the eclipse awesome and was awed by it.

What is this thing called awe? In popular conversation the word "awesome" is much devalued at the moment. Almost every young person who serves us in a shop or café congratulates us with an "awesome" when we use our credit card to achieve an awesomely complete purchase of an awesome flat white coffee or awesome packet of frozen peas. But actual sensations of true awe are infrequent and rare.

In the very week in which the moon awed us by turning into a celestial pomegranate, up there pops online, helpfully, a mind-tickling essay on the subject of awe.

Summer Allen discusses what awe is, where it comes from and what it does. There turns out to be a scholarly discipline called "awe studies", and she fossicks in it.

Here's a little of what she writes. See if it contains echoes of what you felt on Wednesday as, gasping, you watched the moon's awesome growing pomegranaticity.

"'I define it [awe] as the feeling of being in the presence of something vast and mysterious that you don't understand with your current knowledge,' says Dacher Keltner, the founder and a faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, and a leading researcher into the psychology of awe.

"A landmark new scientific conceptualisation of awe by Keltner and his fellow psychologist Jonathan Haidt was published in 2003, based on what had been written about it from the fields of religion, philosophy, sociology and psychology. They proposed that, as varied as awe experiences can be, they all share two features: 'perceived vastness' and [a need, after that experience] to change our understanding of the world.

"According to this framework, while the perceived vastness of dramatic vistas such as canyons and mountains can provoke strong feelings of awe, this aspect of the emotion isn't limited to literal size. Rather, it encompasses anything that is experienced as being much larger than the self, or the self's ordinary level of experience.

"Awe can seem mind-bending in part because it is; it forces us to adjust our mental structures to assimilate new information (recent research scanning people's brains while they experience awe suggests that this effect manifests at a neural level in decreased activity in the left middle temporal gyrus, a brain area that's known to be involved in adjusting one's previous schemas and understandings in light of new events and experiences).

"Awe isn't always experienced as a purely positive emotion. In around a quarter of awe experiences, people also report feeling a layer of fear. Imagine the mix of awe and alarm you might feel if you stumbled upon a grizzly bear on a hike, were stuck in a thunderstorm, or contemplated going to hell."

MORE IAN WARDEN:

Summer Allen doesn't go there, but this columnist would add that as well as fear, other negative experiences of awe can include bewildered misery, a powerful disappointment at awesome awfulness in people and things. For example, Donald Trump and Boris Johnson strike me as being awesomely awful human beings, their awfulness so vast and mysterious (similarly vast and mysterious the readiness of millions of people to love them and to vote for them) that it is all something way beyond a thinking, decent person's ordinary level of experience.

Having said that, the emotional experience of awe can be either positive or negative. Summer Allen reports research showing that three-quarters of awe experiences are positive "and have a lot of delight in them".

From this point, for me her hitherto intellectually stimulating essay turns to New Age, touchy-feely metaphysical self-improving blancmange. She says that awe is so good for our souls (a kind of Pilates for the emotions) that we should follow the aforementioned Dacher Keltner's Keltner's Eight Wonders of Life - Eight Ways to Seek Out More Awe so that our average day is blissfully awe-packed.

Read these eight wonders, these eight ways, if you wish. But my feeling as someone who, without trying, experiences more awe than you can poke a stick at (I identify with a favourite poem of a favourite poet who gives thanks that she is serially in a state of "astonishment and bliss") I doubt one can be taught to be awe-attuned. It may be as futile as requiring someone incapable of empathy to undergo a laughable course of empathy training. For example, Ms Allen suggests an exposure to awesome art, poetry, music and film as likely awesomeness-sensitisers, but one's experience is that when a person is impervious to loveliness he or she is a lost cause.

Methinks an ability to feel true awe that deeply, truly shivers the soul's timbers is a talent, perhaps a gift. You cannot educate a mug. You can lead a boor to culture, but you can't make him think. You can show people the moon turning into a celestial pomegranate, but unless they're blessed with the right awe-attuned flair they'll never give spontaneous gasps of "Awesome!"