Overwhelmed By Space

or else to think that the safe, solid ground on which they were living was spinning off through the vast universe gave them an unsettling feeling, and they didn’t care to believe it.

You might think of it as ‘cosmic insignificance therapy’: when things all seem too much, what better solace than a reminder that they are, provided you’re willing to zoom out a bit, indistinguishable from nothing at all? The anxieties that clutter the average life – relationship troubles, status rivalries, money worries – shrink instantly down to i

Responses to the sublime are puzzling. While the 18th century saw ‘the beautiful’ as a wholly pleasurable experience of typically delicate, harmonious, balanced, smooth and polished objects, the sublime was understood largely as its opposite: a mix of pain and pleasure, experienced in the presence of typically vast, formless, threatening, overwhelm

“Most of the time it all feels like it’s happening really far away from me. Like the world is something that’s happening to other people, but not to me. Maybe it’s just that there’s so much clutter already in my brain that I can’t take in anything else. As if all of my anxieties are a barrier between me and all the things I should be worried about.