"The sublime can also be found in a formless object" - Kant

[askygoneonfire]

 

I got off the bus tonight, and glanced to my right and there, over the regency houses of Brunswick Square, was the sunset.  I didn't think twice, I headed down to the sea.

As I got down to the promenade, the silhouettes of other Brightonians stood against the pink-orange sky.  People making their way home, walking their dogs, watching - as I was - the sunset.

For them as well as me, I wager the scale of the sky and the sunset began to elicit the experience of the sublime.

 

Nature is sublime in those of its appearances whose intuition carries with it the idea of their infinity - Kant

I strolled to the very edge of the promenade and looked down on the beach.  The waves were gently rolling in to shore.  A couple sat huddled together on the pebbles, transfixed by the celestial display to the West.

I stood and let it wash over me.  The pink to purple to orange to yellow to red of the sky.  The flecks of glowing red flecked through the seemingly whipped cloud which lay softly over the sea.  The colours caught, reflected, intensified, moved by the calm sea.

I began to tremble inside.  The power, the scale, the half light, the flow of other people to the promenade to watch the sun set - people who both seemed to be beside me and a hundred miles away.  

 

The feeling of the sublime is pleasure that arises only indirectly: it is produced by the feeling of a momentary inhibition of the vital forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger. - Kant

My mind took it all in and I suppose Kant would say my imagination made it into something more.  My imagination combined it with every sunset I'd ever seen, every time I'd ever stood and just stared, passively, out to sea, every time I had been moved all compounded and I was moved.  There, in the sky - in me - was the Sublime.