Definition
The adjective “sublime” refers to something that is of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty that it inspires a sense of awe, reverence, or admiration.
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Excerpts from News Articles
1
The British visual artist, now based in Chicago, has become known for his sublime imagery of remote landscapes using drone lighting, enhancing craggy peaks with halos, or writing glyphs in the sky like signals from a supernatural entity. But for a long time, art was just a passion project while he focused on a music career as one of the four members of the synth-pop band Ladytron.
2
Until now, we've known Vermeer as a methodical and sublime artist, a magical painter of light and luminous moments of 17th-century Dutch middle-class life. He captures arresting domestic scenes: women reading or writing letters, a housemaid pouring milk, a woman playing a lute, a young girl wearing a pearl earring.
3
That the judicial system may be missing, given these constraints, many more opportunities to build public confidence than the opposite, has become clearer as standards in political discourse and in public deliberation have collapsed around it. Like the select committee that, with sublime courtesy, exposed a Boris Johnson helpless without the insults and bluster that constitute his entire rhetorical and intellectual capability, the courts, at their best, add to their familiar attractions those of civility, listening, fairness and respect.
4
The diva is where the sublime meets the shamelessly self-indulgent and the slightly (sometimes very) silly. In the exhibition’s accompanying promotional materials, Dame Shirley Bassey defines the diva as a person who manages to “break through barrier after barrier: to have your voice heard”. As a mixed-race Welsh woman who topped the charts in the early 60s, Bassey carved her own path with breathtaking chutzpah. At the same time, she is represented in the exhibition by her 2017 Glastonbury outfit, a hot pink feathered gown by Julien Macdonald, and a pair of bejewelled wellies.
5
The score ends up sounding like the Baroque lovechild of Vivaldi and Philip Glass, and it’s… Well, it’s sublime .
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Everyone deserves to feel like a princess sometimes, but unlike Princesscore, but while adopting the polite-society mores and the fashion of that trend, Queencore allows something more sublime . It's an opportunity to take on the chalice of ruling royalty. If Princesscore is about courtesy and tiaras, Queencore is for those in search of a crown and gravitas. Jonny Walfisz
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Mitzi Rapkins: What I got out of this collection, Above Ground, was this holiness, this succulence about life and the awe but also alongside the pain and the possibility of annihilation, all kind of happening together at once. I got this sense that maybe you even had a moment, like a sublime transcendent moment, watching cicadas. And I don’t know if that’s what brought this all together, but I am just curious about your reaction to my read.
8
Jeannie Marshall reflects on finding the sublime (alongside the irritating) during a year of visits to the Sistine Chapel.
9
Certainly, there are some forms of writing for which that’s nothing but good advice, but taken to the extreme of dictate handed down from Sinai, it eliminates much of which is lush and fecund in long sentences, what is ecstatic, incantatory, and sublime about literature. At their most excessive (which is to say their least excessive), the partisans of parsimony can be Puritans, white-washing the church walls and smashing the stained-glass windows; the militants of minimalism are managers of language concerned only with the bottom line.
10
In my room, I had messages: the talk was on, and would take place at 1:30 pm—meaning that anyone who wanted to see her would need to skip a day in Italy, having lost one already to the Kantian sublime . This seemed like a hard sell, but when I posed it to Tenneal, with her many little ear piercings, she eagerly assured me the turnout would be high. “It’s Gwyneth,” she said. “That’s who they’re all here for!”
11
As expected, the nucleus proved to be a mixture of water and other volatile ices and rocky (silicate) and carbon-rich (organic) dust. About 70 percent of the nucleus surface was covered by a dark insulating “crust” that prevented water ice below it from sublimating , but the other 30 percent was active and produced huge bright jets of gas and dust. The crust turned out to be very black (blacker than coal), reflecting only about 4 percent of the sunlight it received back into space, and it was apparently a surface coating of less-volatile organic compounds and silicates.
12
In this isolation he becomes the second lonely figure—the guilty one—of the company. In the profound conception of his theme, in the perfect yet seemingly simple arrangement of the individuals, in the temperaments of the Apostles highlighted by gesture, facial expressions, and poses, in the drama and at the same time the sublimity of the treatment, Leonardo attained a height of expression that has remained a model of its kind. Countless painters in succeeding generations, among them great masters such as Rubens and Rembrandt, marveled at Leonardo’s composition and were influenced by it and by the painting’s narrative quality.
13
The Kazan kebab entrees are slight variations in which pan-fried beef or lamb, fragrant with cumin, are spooned atop your choice of rice or naan, either of which becomes enriched with drippings. Bostan may not have much for vegetarians, but it does serve a sublime eggplant salad, the skin crisp and the interior lush, each bite animated with garlic and soy sauce.
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It’s no longer necessary that he connect in people’s minds with any actual art. It’s enough that he stands for that bigger thing: unfettered creativity. In fact, it’s better. A clear line connects Picasso’s description of his pictures as “a sum of destructions” and the capitalist mantra of “creative destruction” and the onetime internal Facebook motto “Move fast and break things.” Sublimating Picasso’s oeuvre into an essence of pure creativity certainly makes it easier for the marketing arms of corporations to invoke his name and for museums to sell tickets.
15
The conversion/confession story, here as in my undergraduate reading list, has a kind of sublime simplicity: I am not the person I once was, but the experience of change has enabled me to speak with the tongues of angels about both my former life and my new life. For Marshall, this means that studying Michelangelo’s work provides her with a new perspective on her life.
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Her writing style was simple and accessible, modeled on her journalistic idol, A.J. Liebling, and its power came from a bred-in-the-bone love of what we eat and how we eat it. She could exalt a good hot dog as much as a sublime black truffle. She explored 600 ways to make chicken soup and picked the best. Pro tip: It begins with a six-pound kosher pullet, a hen less than a year old.
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Seven miles out of the city centre, and with sublime views over gently undulating hills, this modern, white washed granite and oak building strives for Nordic simplicity, but is a little too busy to truly succeed. The bathrooms are on the small side in the standard rooms, though you’ll want to spend much of your time in the hugely impressive mosaic tiled indoor pool. The in-house Mill Restaurant also makes the most of local produce.
18
Reading this I paused, thinking about my own aged parents, reminded of the beauty and terror of our shared mortality. Aphrodite’s Breath is one of those sublime books that both pleases and pursues you with its imagery and thoughts, long after you’ve put the book down.
19
Yet by now, the landscape has begun to reveal a sinister beauty. The volcano, when it appears, slithers and spits and oozes so majestically that I realised my mouth was literally hanging open. In one tracking shot, the travellers’ path through the mountain slowly disappears into the mountainside itself, the craggy, impassive face of a giant. The director Hlynur Palmason has a remarkable gift for the visually sublime – sublime in the old sense of ‘terrifying’.
20
Soldiers in combat have better survival rates than many flamenco singers judging by the history. If it’s not the chain smoking, it’s the drug use or interfamilial squabbles ending in stabbings. But the tragedy coexists with – perhaps is a fundamental part of – producing sublime artistry that offers further evidence that no matter how tawdry man becomes or how low he sinks, he is never entirely removed from the angels.
21
Just when it seemed that Wren’s reputation was secure, however, the Gothic Revival, with its obsession with morality and medievalism, began to fight back. Pugin dismissed English baroque as degenerate and announced that St Paul’s was a meagre imitation of Italian paganism. John Ruskin sneered at St Paul’s and deplored the English Renaissance (the entire Renaissance, in fact) as a regrettable lapse after the sublime purity of the Gothic.
22
In January 1863, Lincoln thanked the cotton workers of Lancashire for their support, calling their act of solidarity “an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country”. While Manchester celebrates this with a statue of the president in Lincoln Square, it also continues to pay homage to the ships that enabled slavery.
23
“After [the chair] Miss Dior it was natural to expand the family”, he told press at Milan Design Week, “The duo of creations, the Miss Dior Sweet chair and the Monsieur Dior armchair, are perfectly balanced through these essential, existential notions of gravity and lightness, of yin and yang. Miss Dior and Monsieur Dior, Catherine and Christian Dior, the sister and the brother, the chair and the armchair, is the story of a sublime complementary duality".
24
The opera ends with marriage and reconciliation at the court of Theseus and Hippolyta, but the musical climax is the love scene between Titania and Bottom, at the very heart of the piece. The gradual blending of two radically opposed musical styles into the most exquisitely lyrical language can be deciphered as a musical interpretation of Victor Hugo’s Shakespeare-inspired theory that the sublime is often born of the grotesque.
25
Like most cocktails, the margarita — a combination of tequila, lime and triple sec that has been around since at least the 1930s, with a roster of claimants to its invention — has been endlessly upgraded and complicated by the modern craft cocktail movement. And there are serious and sublime agave spirit bars, in Mexico and domestically, that treat agave spirits, tequila and especially mezcal, as the complex and varied spirits they are.
26
What bliss that would be – if it’s not blocked by post-Brexit border bureaucracy. The sublime Venice-Simplon-Orient Express, I note, is suspending its London-to-Paris leg ‘ahead of the introduction of enhanced biometric passport controls’.
27
We are besieged by borderlessness – biological, territorial, intellectual, moral. Shriver says: ‘This weird new discomfort with making assessments of any kind – because judgement necessarily means rating some people more highly than others – does indeed entail the negation of beauty, of excellence, of the implicitly rare achievement of the sublime . Great art in any medium is unusual.
28
One subject, a local doctor, compared the gas’s revelations to “reading a sublime passage in poetry when circumstances contribute to awaken the finest sympathies of the soul.” Davy himself enjoyed walking alone beside the river on summer nights, “sipping away” at a bag of nitrous oxide and occasionally losing consciousness.
29
‘Ugly’ is usually meant to slander, but in recent decades, aesthetic categories have been treated with growing suspicion. ‘We cannot see beauty as innocent,’ writes the philosopher Kathleen Marie Higgins, when ‘the sublime splendor of the mushroom cloud accompanies moral evil.’ Debates gain traction as the world changes, as ‘beautiful’ and ‘ugly’ meanings slip and slide.
30
The forest trail of hair on the torso. But women are sublime , whether or not they conform to dominant (often western) ideas of attractiveness, which nevertheless change throughout history. Toned tummies or rolls of fat that can form a kiss around belly buttons.
31
According to Bachalis the Cloud experience is similarly sublime . “It’s super, super comfortable,” she says.
32
Indeed, there is a childlike wonder in me as I walk with that rainbow beaming down. Wordsworth knew that same joy. He also understood how there was a sublime sense to being in the natural world, to appreciating the numinous aspect of nature. I struggle to recall the final lines of the poem.
33
Well, they’ll come no more, the old masters, not with that mastery, not with that mockery, not with that sublime capacity to risk everything for the sake of a joke that’s within an inch of being on the teller. What’s the old adage derived from Paul Kelly: nationalism governs every aspect of life in Australia until it becomes official and then it is universally despised. Try taking that as your abiding joke sheet and getting away with it.
34
“For all the sublimity of the cause for which we fought, we surely created a Belsen of our own,” he lamented, referencing the Nazi concentration camp.
35
Nowadays, educated English-speaking urbanites might call you an epicure if you complain to a waiter about over-salted soup, and stoical if you don’t. In the popular mind, an epicure fine-tunes pleasure, consuming beautifully, while a stoic lives a life of virtue, pleasure sublimated for good. But this doesn’t do justice to Epicurus, who came closest of all the ancient philosophers to understanding the challenges of modern secular life.