Contemplating enormity is…unnerving. Cynics (pessimist rage-baters, not the Greeks) might say that suicide is the only rational and responsible response to life, but despite what French “philosophers” might have written in the first half of the twentieth century, the universe is not so bleak and boring as all that. If you’re bored, then you’re boring, I always say, and I can’t overstate just how tedious and recalcitrant I find all that nonsense to be; the suicidal, existential paralysis, not the French in general. Anyway, it’s not that I don’t understand the feeling of disquiet that accompanies awakening to the reality that humans are animals doomed by their own cerebrality to an unending struggle between cosmic dread and the urge to anesthetize it…but I do abhor the avoidance of the fight that masquerades as enlightenment and maturity.

Thanatophobia is an extreme fear of death or the dying process. You might be scared of your own death or the death of a loved one. Psychotherapy can help most people overcome this disorder. -Cleveland Clinic

I’m not trying to infantilize those who struggle with this most perennial fear, or over-simplify the complexity of the issue, and I’m willing to admit that Thanatophobia isn’t really an adequate summation of the problem; But it certainly plays a part in the discussion, especially as it is had by Millennials and people who boast about reading Baudelaire (the mopey sot). Look, in much the same way your bubbly friend might use “awesome” to describe truffle fries at an overpriced cocktail lounge, sublimity, though seldom used in comparison, has acquired more egregoric and colloquial baggage since the Gothic period. Certainly, words mean what people use them to mean, and harbor no inherent meaning, but, as a cultural case study, we can examine the original meanings of the sublime in late medieval and Gothic English contexts.

I’m not going to build my own case, but I will cite other people who did the work because I am lazy and reclusive. Just kidding, I also wrote some stuff on topics either adjacent to or directly dealing with this kind of thing. If we look back at some of the quintessential writers and thinkers in the Romantic era, we find that they understood sublimity and the Sublime to be far more frightening, potentially, than the way we understand it today. Percy Shelley, in his first official publication St. Irvyne, or the Rosicrucian, absolutely submerges the reader in Romantic sublimity and language saturated with the texture of profundity and inspiration. From the very first chapter, the landscape is awash in descriptive language that dwarfs the palette of even Shelley’s contemporaries. I’m not going to recreate the atmosphere or quote it, but you can get the novella online for dirt cheap.

My point here is that cosmic immensity might bestow a sense of feebleness and dread upon all who dare to approach its portals, but the contemplative man, having the courage to continue the journey beyond the dangling beads in the doorway to the unknown, receives a different message; namely, that the local self doesn’t exist and interconnectedness is the primary law of nature. So, no, Camus, deciding not to commit seppuku is not the most interesting or courageous question you can ask yourself. Also, check out David Morris’s paper on the Gothic period Sublime.