Thursday
I saw the Grand Canyon for the first time yesterday and, as my friends predicted, it exceeded my already sky-high expectations. We can say of Nature what James Boswell said about Samuel Johnson upon hearing of his death: “He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up.” This “nothing” extends to the imagination, which also falters in the face of it. The Grand Canyon is not only bigger that we think but bigger than we can think.
Boswell’s contemporary Edmund Burke attempted to describe such immensity in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Drawing on the Roman theorist Longinus and the French theorist Boileau, Burke wrote that the sublime is something that, in its overwhelming power, transcends all preexistent categories.
An on-line blog essay by one Nasrullah Mambrol sums up Burke’s explanation for why the sublime draws us. Mentioning the Grand Canyon, Mambrol notes that the intense response we have
comes from the fact that the sublime is associated with pain, danger, and anxiety, but not pleasure. The experience of the sublime is one of intense relief. It is associated with scenes like those of the Alps or the Grand Canyon because our first, instinctive response is one of fear. We perceive altitudes or depths that could kill us; then we recall that our vantage point is one of comparative safety—they could kill us, but they will not. Delight is the exalting relief that we feel: We have been overwhelmed with some vehement negative passion, and we have recovered. The thrill of the sublime is that of danger courted and overcome. It is not a positive pleasure but a more intense and delighting experience of danger survived.
A poetic example of someone attempting to articulate the sublime is Percy Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” where he describes feelings similar to what I experienced earlier today. Gazing at the mountain and the roiling waterfalls that produce the Arve River, the poet writes,
Thy caverns echoing to the Arve’s commotion,
A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame;
Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,
Thou art the path of that unresting sound—
Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime…
For more specific references to the Grand Canyon, I came across passages by two fine essayists, Bill Bryson and J.B. Priestly. Bryson first:
Nothing prepares you for the Grand Canyon. No matter how many times you read about it or see it pictured, it still takes your breath away. Your mind, unable to deal with anything on this scale, just shuts down and for many long moments you are a human vacuum, without speech or breath, but just a deep, inexpressible awe that anything on this earth could be so vast, so beautiful, so silent.
Even children are stilled by it. I was a particularly talkative and obnoxious child, but it stopped me cold. I can remember rounding a corner and standing there agog while a mouthful of half-formed jabber just rolled backwards down my throat, forever unuttered. I was seven years old and I’m told it was only the second occasion in all that time that I had stopped talking, apart from short breaks for sleeping and television. …
… The scale of the Grand Canyon is almost beyond comprehension. It is ten miles across, a mile deep, 180 miles long. You could set the Empire State Building down in it and still be thousands of feet above it. Indeed you could set the whole of Manhattan down inside it and you would still be so high above it that buses would be like ants and people would be invisible, and not a sound would reach your. The thing that gets you – that gets everyone – is the silence. The Grand Canyon just swallows sound. The sense of space and emptiness is overwhelming. Nothing happens out there. Down below you on the canyon floor, far, far away, is the thing that carved it: the Colorado River. It is 300 feet wide, but from the canyon’s lip it looks thin and insignificant. It looks like an old shoelace. Everything is dwarfed by this mighty hole.”
Now Priestly from Midnight on the Desert:
I have heard rumors of visitors who were disappointed. The same people will be disappointed at the Day of Judgment. In fact, the Grand Canyon is a sort of landscape Day of Judgment. It is not a show place, a beauty spot, but a revelation. The Colorado River, which is powerful, turbulent and so thick with silt that it is like a saw, made it with the help of the erosive forces of rain, frost, and wind, and some strange geological accidents; and all these together have been hard at work on it for the last 7 or 8 million years. It is the largest of the 18 canyons of the Colorado River, is over 200 miles long, has an average width of 12 miles and is a good mile deep. It is the world’s supreme example of erosion. But this is not what it really is. It is, I repeat, a revelation. The Colorado River made it, but you feel when you are there that God gave the Colorado River its instructions. It is all Beethoven’s nine symphonies in stone and magic light. Even to remember that it is still there lifts up the heart. If I were an American, I should make my remembrance of it the final test of men, art, and policies. I should ask myself: Is this good enough to exist in the same country as the Canyon? How would I feel about this man, this kind of art, these political measures, if I were near that rim? Every member or officer of the Federal Government ought to remind himself, with triumphant pride, that he is on the staff of the Grand Canyon.
To quote Shelley again, “Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee I seem as in a trance sublime.”