The sublime is the moment when scale unsettles certainty.

When mountain or storm reminds us that the world is larger, older, less manageable than we would like to believe. Perspective can be terrifying as a reality-check.

For Wordsworth, that shock before a towering mountain peak ultimately steadied the mind. The self trembled, but survived enlarged.¹

Arthur Machen, born in Caerleon and shaped by the layered landscapes of Wales, turns that experience inward. In ‘The White People’, heaven is “lit by a black sun.”

Illumination itself becomes strange. 

The visible world feels thin, as though something older, alien presses beneath it. In this he is an ancestor – an influence on – superb modern authors like Jeff VanderMeer. And he sits at the same intertextual table as HP Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood. Whenever I re-read Frankenstein (1818), I hear Mary Shelley‘s awe at being confronted by the Alps.

That said, stand on a North Wales ridge when the mist erases the horizon. The mountain no longer reads as scenery; it becomes a liminal threshold. And the further you are from ‘humanity’, the more you might believe that, as I once discovered on a wild camping trip in the Lake District.

That unease, half awe – half suspicion, is Machen’s territory.

Join the conversation: tell me about texts which remind you that man is actually pretty insignificant in the scheme of things.

1. William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850) ↩︎