Too often the abstract sublime that seems to be his goal comes across as the waxy macabre.
But then it's the mixture of the banal and the sublime that makes the book so unusual.
But evidently they could also be dangerous: a bridge to the sublime that departed too quickly from the here and now.
Those who believe in God do not have a monopoly over possession of that magnificent sense of the sublime that catches us unaware in the face of the truly mysterious.
At sunset, looking through its great pillars, I feel that profound sense of wonder, the weight of the sublime, that catches me when I am in great wildernesses, only here is a nature of our creating.
This hypertrophied response to decay and dilapidation is what drives the "ruin gaze", a kind of steroidal sublime that enables us to enlarge the past because we cannot enlarge the present.
As a young girl, she used to go to galleries and museums with her father; this early experience of the sublime — that is, looking and thinking in a presumably protective presence — no doubt accounts for the internal feel of her criticism, its circularity.
It is the topic of an incomplete treatise, On the Sublime, that was for long attributed to the 3rd-century Greek philosopher Cassius Longinus but now believed to have been written in the 1st century ad by an unknown writer frequently designated Pseudo-Longinus.
By and large, the depictions of the weather in this show are decidedly unromantic, in stark contrast to visions of weather as a manifestation of the sublime that are found, for instance, in the 19th-century paintings of the Hudson River School.
