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(2018
midterm assignment) Sample Student Midterm Answers 2018 #2b: Short Essay (Term) (index) |
LITR 4328 |
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Billy
Ea
The Subliminal Messages of The Sublime
“I am
glad to the brink of fear.”
-Nature (1836), Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The
most fascinating concept that I have encountered this semester thusly is the
idea of the sublime. It is a natural and exhilaratingly scary experience that I
have encountered times before within my life. But I have never found a way to
meaningfully express its intense feeling of liberation until I discovered the
sublime’s strength. A term that pushes the essence of human emotion to its peak
in an enjoyably horrific manner.
In the Romantic aesthetics of literature, the sublime is used to express
the mixture of beauty and terror to an elevated scale that captivates the
audience into a cocktail of heightened emotions. The beautiful thing about the
sublime is that it can be often be overlooked. To explore this area requires a
depth of higher thought before one can fully appreciate the writer’s conviction
of text.
From Emerson’s Nature, line
six of chapter one says, “But if a man would be alone, let him look at the
stars.” This is a wonderous line that paints the sublime masterfully. To
understand the fear, one must grasp the extent of what it means to be truly
alone. Not merely in the sense of temporary solitude from others but accepting
that life’s journey is simply an isolated experience that is forever entrapped
within the mind is a hard thought to accept. To gaze upon the vastly infinite
stars provides wonder and awe for the limited time man possesses on this world
is the epitome of what the sublime provides.
In what form the sublime takes are completely subjective to how the text
is interpreted. In The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow (1819) by Washington Irving, he goes to say in line 61, “There was
something in the moody and dogged silence of this pertinacious companion that
was mysterious and appalling.” In this instance, he is speaking of solely the
silence that is described as moody and dogged before depicting the environment
as “mysterious” and “appalling” which captures the breath of the reader of
excitement with fear.
This idea of the sublime involves emotion, which I believe is the driving
force for many of us as social creatures. Emotions gives purpose. A reason to
even live on at times, and to understand it through the abstract idea of
literature is a door that is blissfully awaiting to be opened within all of us.
This concept matters because it allows people to feel alive. Even if it is
enjoyably horrific in the moment, we enjoy it because it is merely temporary.
That is the sublime.
