The Sweatshop Sublime III

Between the internet and my own limited reference books I was able to cobble together some information on the sublime.


Evidently the notion was introduced by Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (don't look for it at B & N, it's out of stock).


But I did get the following:  Sublime:  "its formal cause is [...] the passion of our fear (especially the fear of death); the material cause is equally aspects of certain objects such as vastness, infinity, magnificence, etc.; its efficient cause is the tension of our nerves" Web 9/10/14.


Emanuel Kant then picked up this cookie and ran with it.  There is a quote in the Robbins article (85).


This inspired the Romantic poets who all trekked off  to the Swiss Alps en masse.  It was in Switzerland that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote  Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus and Byron The Prisoner of Chillon.


Anyway, our friend Will Wordsworth himself took a hike in the Alps.  He does tend to go no a bit but this excerpt is from The Prelude, Book Six, "Cambridge and the Alps:"


      Imagination!  lifting up itself
Before the eye and progress of my song
Like an unfathered vapour, here that power,
In all the might of its endowments, came
Athwart me.  I was lost in a cloud,
Halted without a struggle to break through,
And now, recovering, to my soul I say,
'I recognize they glory.' In such strength
Of usurpation, is such visitings
Of awful promise, when the light of sense
Goes out in flashes that have shown to us
The invisible world, doth greatness make abode,
There harbors whether we be young or old.
Our destiny, our nature, and our home,
Is with infinitude, and only there --
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and experience, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.
Yadda, Yadda, Yadda (525-542)


Now, here's a tid-bit that may be interesting (but probably not)


I'm half Swiss and every year I visit the Old Country.  I think I might have a genetic predisposition to feel like it is coming home because I get goosebumpy.  I rent a car and drive between Geneva and Laussane on Lac Leman (aka Lake Geneva).  The Swiss Alps on one side and the French Alps on the other is breathtaking.  From my father's apartment there is a view of Mont Blanc, weather permitting, and that is truly something.  Old Will Wordsworth mentions it specifically in The Prelude, Book Six (453).


So, what we're getting at here is a sense of awe (not to be confused with that tired and meaningless, awesome).


As ever,


Cheerio