Some essential part of stories lies in their telling. Here is a story:
Kant has the idea of the sublime, whereby the aesthetic is significantly determined by its ability to transcend (and hence terrify) our senses. For instance the magnitude of a mountain or a storm – both threaten our sense of self and perception by impressing upon us fact that there is always more, forcing us to teeter closer to the edge of the infinite. Where Kant’s imagination is limited is most obvious in considerations of the precise and the minutia. Kant could gaze at the starry heavens above him in wonder and with a sense of humility that dwindles the self into an insignificant point, but he was unable to do the same to the ever-fractionating nature of matter itself. There is a happy mirroring between the mythical aims of man to build a tower to smash into the heavens, and our own era’s obsession with foundries purposed with the smashing of matter itself. Today’s Colloseus, leaning into Einstein’s limit, stealing atoms from the void, dissolving matter into substance, forms a modern metaphor to the story of primordial creation and destruction. The intertwining of magnetic coils and X-rays form lovers’ limbs.
Have I lost you yet between the drifting imagery?
The previous point continues to prove that Lucretius[I] is precipient in seeing the sublime and the aesthetic in the atomic, and consequentially the applicability of his ethos into the post-modern era by appropriating it into a materialist Zen.
De Rerum Natura.[I]
The mad machinery of war drift off to sleep {I.30}
[I] “Titus Lucretius Carus (/ˈtaɪtəs ljuːˈkriːʃəs/; c. 15 October 99 BC – c. 55 BC) was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is the philosophical poem De rerum natura, a didactic work about the tenets and philosophy of Epicureanism, and which is usually translated into English as On the Nature of Things. Lucretius has been credited with originating the concept of the three-age system which was formalised from 1834 by C. J. Thomsen”. For further details see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucretius.
