Sublime melancholia

Sublimity in the twenty-first century is no longer manifest as the emotion of 'wonder and fear' at dynamic natural phenomena but rather as sublime melancholia, the 'wonder of loss' for the vanishing natural world. The Apollo Program missions of 1968 to 1972 represent both the apotheosis of the Romantic Sublime and the beginning of this shift in sublime emotion. The first images of the Earth in Space focus attention on the uniqueness and fragility of our planet while drawing awareness to the destructive human practices threatening the biosphere. This dissertation examines how melancholia and the fear of loss has come to influence sublime feeling. The advent of space tourism (to the Kármán line), adventure expeditions to scenes of destruction (Pripyat/Chernobyl), or tours chasing natural disaster (Whakaari/White Island; Tornado Alley), are emblematic of the need many feel for authentic sublime experience even if at risk to life. Consideration of deep time offers another lens to explore the shift in sublime emotion. Our chronophobia drives our efforts to control time which fail beside the human-caused geological acceleration of our planet that is underway. Unearthing deep time capsules (Siccar Point) hidden in our planet's geological record create new sublime landscapes to consider. The discovery and opening of time capsules in the historical human record–accidently or tragically occurring capsules (Pompeii; Ötzi the Iceman; shipwrecks Erebus and Terror) or deliberately created ones (messages in bottles; Anne Frank's diary; crypto capsules)–offer insights into the challenges we face in our changing world. We must consider how what we leave behind will constitute time capsules for our ancestors many generations hence (the Anthropocene midden; urban fossilization). We create time capsules today as a way forward out of the nihilism of the human age. We fill these capsules (Golden Record; Svalbard Global Seed Vault; Future Library) with our deep emotion for the living world; we embed both our wonder and fear of loss into these time travellers and send them forth as sublime arks to the future. Cultivating 'fresh seeing' and respect towards the natural world helps bridge sublimity and deep time, and gives agency to non-human life that we can harness to stem the melancholia of loss.