Are any of the works we've encountered so far sublime? Or, if you prefer, have you encountered the sublime in nature or in popular culture? Discuss your experience with the work or natural phenomenon, drawing on Burke (and Longinus, too, if you like) to help out.
When I think of my experience with the sublime in terms of nature, I almost always think in terms of what I suppose Burke would categorize as Vastness, and possibly Infinity (through Vastness). One of the things that draws me to nature, both physically and as a topic for writing is its ability to suddenly and unexpectedly humble the observer, through size, through intricacy, through sheer (Burke again, I think) Power. One can encounter awe and amazement through the scope of nature without necessarily being terrified in a life-threatening sense, though I think the possibility of terror is what makes the experience of observing nature sublime in the first place. I suppose what I mean is that while simply observing a mountain, or a cliff, or the Grand Canyon doesn't necessarily put you in any immediate danger (this is especially true of sublime natural spaces that have been sufficiently tourist-ized), the very Vastness of these spaces can cause one to feel so dwarfed, so insignificant, that the resulting feeling of the triviality of the self can be just as terrifying as, say, the immediate possibility of plunging to one's death into the Grand Canyon might be.
My first night in the woods on a bona fide backpacking trip is a good example of what I'm trying (and perhaps failing) to explain. I had been camping many, many times before this trip, and so I was well accustomed (or so I thought) to the night, to the sounds of the woods, to other things that you would expect a first-time camper to perhaps react adversely to. It's also probably important to note that I was twenty years old on this trip.
We got to the trailhead early that day, and as I remember we hiked something like six or eight hours into the woods before calling a stop for the night, finding a spot to set up our camp just as the sun's rays were starting to slant noticeably. It was late fall, and so we estimated we had something like an hour or ninety minutes to get our business taken care of before seeing our hands in front of our faces became an impossible proposition. It was at this point, when we first stopped, that I became unreasonably terrified. There was a feeling, at least in my mind, that the oncoming darkness provided an non-negotiable barrier. Nighttime was something to be hidden from, something that would set upon us and, if we weren't fast enough, leave us stranded in a sort of unseeing stasis until the sun came up again.
I didn't know why I suddenly felt this way, and I hurried through setting up my tent and cooking dinner in somewhat of a panic. The last few steps of this process had to be done with the aid of a headlamp, which only exacerbated my terror. I spent most of the night curled up in my tent, jumping at every howl of wind, and every footfall of squirrel or deer outside.
In retrospect, this wasn't because I was afraid of direct physical harm, because, as I said, I'd been camping many times before and had gotten over my fear of "monsters" in the dark by the time I was about ten. It was instead because the night made the forest into something completely different, it made my world seem suddenly entirely too big and entirely too full of possibilities for me to conveniently deal with. We were miles from the relative safety of the car we had left at the trailhead, and in the dark, with little to no moonlight, were our headlamps to malfunction (a scenario I played out over and over again in my head), even those few miles would likely be unnavigable.
It was the immensity of the place, the immensity of the world that scared me, and the fact that at night in the woods that world didn't exist for the sake of my reassurance and support, as the world constructed by our cultural viewpoint generally does. I wanted some form of control, which wouldn't necessarily be possible again until the sun rose.
I have since grown to appreciate this feeling, this mini-terror (which, incidentally, I still feel an echo of everytime I'm in the woods at sunset) as a reminder, a useful way of centering my perspective on the world as opposed to centering it on myself as the world. I think that most (if not all) of my sublime experiences in nature spring from this. Seeing a mountain that seems too large to actually be there, seeing the sky spread out in near-infinite clearness hundreds of miles from any city lights; these are always slightly terrifying experiences for me. The first time I drove out to Pullman, cross-country on highway 70, about an hour across the Colorado border I got a glimpse of the Rockies for the first time, marching across the horizon like what I thought was a low line of thunderstorms. As we drew closer, my mind slowly realized that they must be mountains, but there was something terrifying in that, something in admitting that such a thing was possible that demanded that I feel a little smaller. And there's always some fear in admitting that, I think. Maybe that's what's at the heart of my sublime experience.
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