The Irony of the Sublime

On my run this morning, I listened to the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony four times. It is a sublime creation. And what that means for me is that it inspires in me an emotional response that is inexpressible and therefore, even unintelligible. I can experience the sublime but I cannot describe it. The idea of the sublime reminds me of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. To understand completely is there referred to as to grok. There was no word in the English language, I suppose, for the concept for which Heinlein grasped, and so he invented one. The word has since passed out of currency, but some of us still recall its usefulness.

I studied the sublime as an undergraduate English major when it was associated with Byron’s Manfred, and most recently, the sublime came up in conversation with Anna Rose, who asked what the sublime meant. Maybe Hannah Montana used the word. I told her that the sublime was something which occurred which was inexpressible. She asked if the holocaust was sublime. It was a great question, I think.

I think the sublime raises our lives to a level of some exaltation and glory. Inexpressible as the holocaust is, thoughts of it only drag me through the muck and the grime. Now, the response of say, the fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto, the courage with which they fought the Nazis, that is an example of the sublime.

Beethoven’s seventh is a sublime experience for me, and I can define to what I respond—musical tensions resolving into triumph, the flutes and piccolos flying above the basses—but I cannot define the emotion itself. Words would only reduce the sublime to the mundane.

I ran well this morning.