Dispatches from the underworld

Edmund Burke, as a young Irish lawyer in 1756, first made the distinction between beauty and sublimity. Beauty for Burke was about continuity and connectedness. ‘Vegetables,’ he says, in one of the great pre-Romantic sentences, ‘are not sublime.’ Vegetables are beautiful because they are constant and continuous, and because beauty is the quality of perfect continuity: ‘The sense of being swiftly drawn in an easy coach on a smooth turf with gradual ascents and declivities is a better idea of the beautiful than anything.’

The sublime is the opposite, needing deep distances, withdrawals and chasms —the Abgrund, in the resonantly expressive German word for ‘an abyss’.  And where can you find the Abgrund, that hollow of otherness, on an average English day? Burke’s answer is in the gaps between the strokes of a single, slowly ringing bell, that chasm of a pause as you wait for the next stroke, each gap a hole opened in the texture of the world, a repeated view into silence, as if it occupied a floor below the one on which we stand.