Like most folks who spend too much time on The Tubes, I’m signed up for dozens of newsletters that I rarely, if ever, crack open. But I never do a thoughtless delete of The Prepared, a weekly publication about the nitty-gritty of how complex and gargantuan objects get made. Though a fair chunk of each email isn’t germane to me—I wish I was smart enough to take advantage of their high-falutin’ job listings—I always find something worthwhile to ponder and explore. The curators’ genuine affection for the topics they cover never fails to shine through, and they clearly spend more time writing their meditative intros than I put into the typical Microkhan post. This week’s lede about the concept of the sublime is an excellent case in point.
Most of us have been rendered speechless, even frightened, by something truly awesome in nature. What about the objects we make ourselves? They can be sublime too. Throughout history, inspiring awe, veneration and fear would have been front of mind for the people building our places of worship. These same ideas – awe, veneration, and fear – feature prominently in modern starchitecture, and one can imagine that every person working on megaprojects (from bridges, to dams, to highways) sees themselves as working towards a grand, transcendent goal. I think we can go even further: even when we don’t intend it, many human creations go on to acquire the quality of the sublime. Despite being borne of our own minds and bodies, they become things we cannot ever truly know. It is in that space, beyond rational understanding, that we encounter the sublime.
Back tomorrow with something related to a new project I’m pondering, an endeavor that has brought me in touch with a genre of nonfiction whose heyday coincided with my childhood: The self-aggrandizing athlete memoir.
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