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My eye was arrested by the title: “On the Modality of a Judgment About the Sublime in Nature.” To me, this rang of postgraduate pretension and desperation. Surely there’d been many a paper written on nature, and more than a few (plus an infinite number of bad poems) on the sublime in nature. And judgment on the sublime in nature had been frequently passed. (Most people seem to like it.) But had anyone ever tackled the modality of that judgment? No? Then I will.
For I had immediately sensed myself in the presence of something Bleader-worthy. I simply had to work out my approach. There is a game my family likes to play called Book. Each participant in turn takes a book off the shelf, a book that preferably no one else has heard of, and announces the title and author. Everyone else composes a first line that suits the title. These are read aloud, along with the actual first line, and points are awarded: a point to everyone who guesses the correct line and a point to the author of each made-up line for every person who guesses it.
The opening line, in case you’re interested, is: “Beautiful nature contains innumerable things about which we do not hesitate to require everyone’s judgment to agree with our own, and can in fact expect such agreement without being wrong very often.”
