As we walk through the village towards the fishing track, my young companion explains the sublime to me. She’s learning about it in school, alongside Shakespeare and the Romantic poets. It refers to a tiny human presence in an epic natural landscape, she tells me. There has to be a contrast between the two.
We are on a lamb-spotting expedition: the ewes carrying single babies or twins are out in the fields now, and some of them have given birth. The smallest of these creatures are less than a day old, a little yellow still, but already staggering after their mothers for milk, wagging their tails and offering up weak bleats to the chilly March air.
We wonder together if there is scope for the sublime in West Oxfordshire. My companion looks unsure. The word sublime comes from the Latin for ‘elevated’ and there are no mountains here, no high peaks or grand vistas. The sublime isn’t really what comes to mind when walking around flat, muddy, sheep-filled fields.
Most philosophers and poets agree that the sublime brings emotional repercussions: being aware of your own insignificance in the presence of awe-inspiring landscapes can evoke deep pleasure and elation or great terror. Very often, the sublime represents the weird mixture of all these feelings at once.
The lambs stay at a distance as we take pictures and exclaim about their cuteness. I think for a moment about the world from their perspective. Hidden behind protective mothers and tree stumps or safely nestled in dips in the ground, I wonder if they are awe-struck by the enormity of this world they have just entered. They show no sign of existential terror, and their apparent signals of joy - a miniature leap, a perkiness of ear - are probably my own projections. But who’s to say there isn’t some kind of awareness of their powerless place in a universe they can’t understand.
My companion prefers to stick to her teacher’s definitions, quite rightly, and insists there must be a lofty landscape with an isolated human in it for the whole thing to work. We discuss the possibility of building an artificial hill in the village to meet at least some of these requirements. I don’t tell her that sometimes the reality of a single exquisite lamb born into the endless flatlands and it’s inevitable future fills me with delight and dread in equal measure.
Walks at this time of year in nature, in any natural environment are sublime, though that Romantic painting of a poet or philosopher standing at the edge of a precipice did come to mind, reading your companion's definition ...!