the.com/sublime
the feeling when beauty gets so big it scares you a little
means So grand, beautiful, or awe-inspiring that it overwhelms ordinary measure and stirs something close to reverence.
from From Latin sublimis, 'uplifted, lofty, exalted' — possibly built from sub- (up to) and limen (lintel, threshold), the high beam over a doorway, as if pointing toward the very top of the frame. It arrived in English through the 16th-century vocabulary of alchemy, where to 'sublime' a substance was to vaporize a solid and let it rise to a higher, purer form — and that sense of something rising past its ordinary state carried into the lofty, awe-struck meaning we use today.
- latin roots
- From sublimis, meaning up to the threshold
- kant's take
- Defined it as pleasure mixed with terror
- chemistry
- Solids that skip liquid and become gas directly
- romantic obsession
- Storms and mountains thrilled 18th-century poets endlessly
- thin line
- One step from the ridiculous, said Napoleon
for instance
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