Wouldn't the global financial system be less vertiginous, less bizarre, if your money actually stood for something?
Step through a doorway and a vertiginous cityscape unfolds before your eyes, with a short wooden plank outstretched, along which you must inch your way before falling to your doom.
This time of year one's thoughts turn toward family, friends, the best rum to decant into eggnog and — if you are like me, three years out of five — the vertiginous mountain of debt on your credit cards, and the financial reckoning that is breathing into your nostrils, a bit like a wolf.
Adrenaline peak A winter classic such as the Aonach Eagach ridge above Glencoe provides a constant low-level adrenaline flow from the moment you step on to the ridge until, two totally committed miles later, your cramponed boots move on to less vertiginous terrain.
Walking Milford resembles Frodo's long plod through the Lord of the Rings films (all shot in New Zealand, along with the two Hobbit movies to come), some of it through inviting, pristine, open meadows; some through dense, moss-draped beech forest; some over steep, rocky terrain that strains your desire to carry on; still more offering vertiginous panoramas.
Still: I just sent my friend a season of a TV show via iTunes for her birthday, which is in most ways better than giving her a box of what will too quickly turn to shit, but clicking toward and downloading a prezzie on your birthday must be a step in the vertiginous march toward the void.
A spindly metal claw, like a tarantula made of steel, squeezes under a door and comes right at you; hummingbirds hover before your face; a ride on a trapeze becomes a vertiginous swing into the depths.
Heels are a must, or rather "vertiginous pumps like you're sitting pretty for your Andy portrait", a spirited nod, perhaps, to the cult of celebrity.
Then it's on to the Kantian sublime: stretching a point rather, Smith discovers Kant's description of the vertiginous apprehension of forces that dwarf reason in your first frenchie: "kissing becomes silence, rational speech cut off, causing us literally to be dumbstruck".
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