It makes me so very happy to respond to my conjured eye-rollers: "Listen, you idiot utilitarians, you cynics and scorched-earth souls! Bliss is a staple of the American character. It is the response of the soul when confronted by the Sublime. Even with the American Transcendentalists and the Hudson River School of painting set aside, we have surfeits of evidence. My favorite example is none less than a passage from Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, "Query V: Cascades," I am not aware of anyone calling this Founding Father an artsy-fartsy, a drugger, or a dreamer. True, he dreamed, and the dreams were mighty, but he was the man for turning them into reality.
Yet here we find him wandering around in the woods, observing his property. He comes upon a natural bridge of stone and the deep ravine it spans. His description of it is mainly geological, full of measurements and other concrete facts. Then suddenly he breaks off:
"The sensation [of observing it] becomes delightful in the extreme. It is impossible for the emotions, arising from the sublime, to be felt beyond what they are here: so beautiful an arch, so elevated, so light, and springing, as it were, up to heaven. the rapture of the spectator is really indescribable!" Then Tom reverts to points of geology, to geographical names. Just a flash of rapture--of bliss-- with it's exclamation point--the resort of the essentially speechless writer.
For Jefferson, the idea of the sublime is inextricably part of his experience of America. I can't see him scattering exclamation points over my cans of paint. But what on earth can be deemed transcendental and a source of bliss if not the purest apprehension of the essence of colors. I ask you.
Another case of the Sublime [Frederick Edwin Church: "Niagra Falls"]
1 comment:
Good grief, whoever said Bliss was worthless?
Though, I guess I have to be somewhat grateful you were moved to write your "defense." I'd not come across what Mr Jefferson had said. It's an understatement but he described it rather well.
I could use some, just like that, right about now.
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