How to think about the sublime

[Celerity]

https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-think-about-the-sublime-in-the-natural-world









There is no single way to elicit this peculiar feeling. Perhaps you have felt it on a hot summer’s night, lying in the grass, scanning a leaden sky for shooting stars, satellites and planets. You are struck by the vastness of the Universe, its infinite measure. There is an anxious and humbling sense of awe and underlying fear.

Maybe, while on a hike, you are struck by unending skies, and the vast sweep of a spectacular and somehow terrifying mountain range, unable to absorb its full size. Perhaps it’s a mountain range like the Alps that you can’t take in all at once but only in parts. Its grandeur is staggering and somewhat frightening.

Maybe you have read a line of poetry that captures an exquisite coming-together of pleasure and pain, or that invites you to see your life in a new light, which throws into relief the delicious strangeness of existence. Or perhaps you have felt unexpectedly transported by the immersive grandeur of a painting.

It’s a sense of being overwhelmed, of impending terror, of encountering the unending incomprehensibility of infinity or a natural force: a phenomenon that shows the limits of the human mind while arousing contemplation. This is the sublime – a pleasurable but unsettling feeling.

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