CR Answer Drill 6A 8MS9

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In this 2002 passage, the author discusses the feeling known as "the sublime," which he experiences while traveling in the Sinai desert. The definition of "the sublime" has been the subject of much discussion and debate.     In my backpack I am carrying a flashlight, a sun hat, and Edmund Burke. In 1757, at the age of twenty-four and after giving up his legal studies in London, Burke composed A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. He was categorical -- sublimity had to do with a feeling of weakness. Many landscapes were beautiful -- meadows in spring, soft valleys, oak trees, banks of flowers (daisies especially) -- but they were not sublime. "The ideas of the sublime and beautiful are frequently confounded," he complained. "Both are indiscriminately applied to things greatly differing and sometimes of natures directly opposite" -- a trace of irritation on the part of the young philosopher with those who gasped at a stream and called that sublime. A landscape could arouse the sublime only when it suggested power -- a power greater than that of humans, and threatening to them. Sublime places embodied a defiance to human will. Burke illustrated his argument with an analogy about oxen and bulls: "An ox is a creature of vast strength; but he is an innocent creature, extremely serviceable, and not at all dangerous; for which reason the idea of an ox is by no means grand. A bull is strong too; but his strength is of another kind; often very destructive. The idea of a bull is therefore great, and it has frequently a place in sublime descriptions, and elevating comparisons."     There were oxlike landscapes, innocent and "not at all dangerous," pliable to human will; landscapes of farms, orchards, hedges, rivers, and gardens. Then there were bull-like landscapes. The essayist enumerated their qualities: they were vast, empty, often dark and apparently infinite because of the uniformity and succession of their elements. The Sinai was among them.     But why the pleasure? Why seek out this feeling of weakness -- delight in it, even? Why leave the comforts of home, join a group of desert devotees and walk for miles with a heavy pack, all to reach a place of rocks and silence where one must shelter from the sun like a fugitive in the scant shadow of giant boulders? Why exhilarate in such an environment, rather than despair?     One answer is that not everything that is more powerful than us must always be hateful to us. What defies our will can provoke anger and resentment, but it may also arouse awe and respect. It depends on whether the obstacle appears noble in its defiance or squalid and insolent. We begrudge the defiance of a cocky acquaintance even as we honor that of the mist-shrouded mountain. We are humiliated by what is powerful and mean but awed by what is powerful and noble. To extend Burke's animal terminology, a bull may arouse a feeling of the sublime, whereas a piranha cannot. It seems a matter of motives; we interpret the piranha's power as being vicious and predatory, and the bull's as guileless and impersonal.     Even when we are not in deserts, the behavior of others and our own flaws are prone to leave us feeling small. Humiliation is a perpetual risk in the human world. It is not unusual for our will to be defied and our wishes frustrated. Sublime landscapes do not therefore introduce us to our inadequacy; rather, to touch on the crux of their appeal, they allow us to conceive of a familiar inadequacy in a new and more helpful way. Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically introduces viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will, that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves.     This is the lesson written into the stones of the desert and the ice fields of the poles. So grandly is it written there that we may come away from such places not crushed but inspired by what lies beyond us, privileged to be subject to such majestic necessities.