The Sublime

Why words begin to fail. (The Bus 5.11)

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The Stop

In the field of literary criticism, the term ‘sublime’ describes a quality of greatness - physical, moral, intellectual or artistic - that is beyond our normal capability to calculate, measure or imitate. The earliest use of the term in this way occurred in either the first or third century CE by the anonymous Greek philosopher Longinus in his work, On the Sublime. In this treatise, Longinus defined literature to be ‘sublime’ if it exhibited ‘excellence in language’, the ‘expression of a great spirit’ and possessed the power to create ‘ecstasy’ in the reader. It was this last condition that Longinus believed to be a writer’s most important goal.¹

South Rim of the Grand Canyon/16 April 2019/Bryan Padrick

Longinus’s definition of the sublime was a serious departure from the traditional, classical understanding of those qualities which determined literary greatness. Previously, literary excellence and success was attributed to a work’s balance of ‘certain technical elements - diction, thought, metaphor, music, etc.’, but Longinus identified the source of the sublime to be the ‘moral, emotional, and imaginative depth of the writer and its expression in the flare-up of genius that rules alone could not produce.’

Like many other ideas and inventions from Antiquity, Longinus’s treatise was largely ignored until it was translated in the 17th century by the French poet and literary critic Nicolas Boileau.² This translation - published the same year as Boileau’s seminal L’Art poétique (1674) in which he established the rules for composing poetry in the Classical tradition - inaugurated a new interest in exploring the ‘powerful emotional effects in art.’ According to Longinus - and now widely available to the educated classes - ‘true nobility in art and life was to be discovered through a confrontation with the threatening and unknown,’ in other words anything ‘that challenges our capacity to understand and fills us with wonder.’ For Longinus (as translated by Boileau), the sublime artist was a sort of ‘superhuman figure capable of rising above arduous and ominous events and experiences in order to produce a nobler and more refined style’.

It was inevitable that these rediscovered ideas about the sublime would eventually become closely associated with the English Romantic movement. Recognising the ‘profoundly limited nature of the self’, this group of poets, philosophers and novelists was interested in exploring experiences which ‘lay beyond conscious control and threatened individual autonomy’, and the language of the sublime provided a vocabulary for those writers and thinkers who ‘wished to challenge traditional systems of thought … that now seemed founded on outdated conceptions of human experience’. The English Romantics in particular believed the sublime was a ‘realm of experience beyond the measurable’ which itself was ‘beyond rational thought, that arises chiefly from the terrors of awe-inspiring natural phenomena’.

There were at the time - of course - various definitions of the sublime, but for most Romantics it was the German philosopher Immanuel Kant who best expressed their understanding of the phenomena.³ In Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790), he identified the sublime as existing at the ‘borderline where reason finds its limits’. Identifying three types of sublimity - ‘the awful, the lofty and the splendid’ - Kant asserted the sublime was less a ‘formal quality of some natural phenomena’ than a truly ‘subjective conception: something that happens in the mind’. Moving his analysis of the sublime towards the ‘impact and consequence of the … experience upon consciousness,’ he defined it as an expression of what occurs when ‘we are faced with something we do not have the capacity to understand or control – something excessive’. The sublime is that quality in nature which we ‘cannot encompass … by thinking’.

The Romantics believed the sublime required careful study and contemplation, with the hope that by internalising their thoughts and attempting to understand them from a philosophical perspective, they would ‘find enlightenment’. Nevertheless, they would retain a healthy recognition that - no matter how well they might think they understood it - the sublime would inevitably remain ‘indiscernible or unnameable, undecidable, indeterminate and unpresentable,’ and - ultimately, haunting:⁴

One summer evening (led by her) I found
A little boat tied to a willow tree
Within a rocky cove, its usual home.
Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in
Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth
And troubled pleasure, nor without the voice
Of mountain-echoes did my boat move on;
Leaving behind her still, on either side,
Small circles glittering idly in the moon,
Until they melted all into one track
Of sparkling light. But now, like one who rows,
Proud of his skill, to reach a chosen point
With an unswerving line, I fixed my view
Upon the summit of a craggy ridge,
The horizon's utmost boundary; far above
Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.
She was an elfin pinnace; lustily
I dipped my oars into the silent lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat
Went heaving through the water like a swan;
When, from behind that craggy steep till then
The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
Towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the covert of the willow tree;
There in her mooring-place I left my bark, -
And through the meadows homeward went, in grave
And serious mood; but after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o'er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

- From The Prelude (Book I, 357-400), William Wordsworth (1850)

The Detour

Today’s Detour is to ‘Come Again’, a short (2:45) performance of the Elizabethan composer John Dowland’s ‘secretly rather saucy’ 1597 tune.⁵ It’s an amazing rendition - there’s truly nothing like a lute, and tenor Morgan Manifacier’s voice is transcendent. Talk about sublime ….

Come Again (John Dowland)

The Recommendation

Today’s Recommendation is Tree of Life (2011). Directed by Terence Malik⁶ and starring Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain and Sean Penn, the film is an epic exploration of the meaning of life. Dealing with themes about memory, innocence, loss, and the complexities of family dynamics, the film moves towards a meditation on these issues in relation to the origins of the universe and the emergence of life on Earth. It’s a very unique blend of the intimate, the cosmic - and the grand questions about existence and our place within it.

Tree of Life (2011) Trailer

The Sounds

Today’s playlist is a selection of five tracks which are - in their own way - sublime: ‘Dayvan Cowboy’ (Boards of Canada, 2005), ‘A Tear for Eddie’ (Ween, 1994), ‘Sedan Delivery’ (Neil Young, 1979), ‘The Aeroplane Flies High (Turns Left, Looks Right)’ (Smashing Pumpkins, 1996) and ‘Oxbow Lakes’ (The Orb, 1995). Enjoy!

The Thought

Today’s Thought is from William Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’ (1798):

‘I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man...’

If you have a thought on this Thought - or any part of today’s issue - please leave a comment below:

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Until the next Stop …

1. I first encountered the ‘sublime’ in an English course at Davidson - Randy Nelson’s 19th Century American Literature, I believe. It was a good class in which we studied great literature … but unfortunately the primary memory that sticks with me is Nelson waxing rhapsodically about the ‘sublime’ descriptions of the prairie in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie (1827) - in my opinion, one of the worst novels ever written. Sources for today’s Stop include: Sublime (Britannica), A Short History of the Sublime (MIT Reader) and Sublime (Literary) (Wikipedia).

2. For more about Boileau, see: Nicolas Boileau (Britannica).

3. For more about Kant, see: Immanuel Kant (Britannica).

4. The excerpt is from Wordsworth’s The Prelude, a part often referred to as ‘Stealing the Boat’. In this, the poet is recounting a time when - as a boy - he secretly took a boat out onto a lake alone at night. At first the experience is magical, but then suddenly he becomes aware of the enormous mountains that surround him. They appear to be trundling towards him like giants and he suddenly understands his existential insignificance in their presence. Scared, he turns his boat around and returns home to where he’s haunted - day and night - by this new knowledge. It’s hard to find a more perfect example of the sublime in English Romanticism.

5. For more about Dowland, see The Bus Issue 1.30 (John Dowland) 18 August 2022.

6. Malik is the celebrated director of Badlands (1973) and The Thin Red Line (1998), among a few others. For more about him, see: Terence Malik (Britannica).