Mother Nature's Blockbusters - New York Times:
Strikes me as a NY Art Critic visiting a strange and wonderful world - outside NYC
"Museums may display what man has made of nature, but these parks and preserves display what nature has made of itself. Works of culture transform nature; they picture it, use it, abstract from it. One is humbled by the Canadian Rockies and Glacier National Park in Montana because nature doesn't return the compliment. It makes nothing of culture; it looms over it, declaring its supreme autonomy and power.
This is close to what the 18th-century philosophers meant by the sublime. Yet the French Encyclop�die of the time also defined the sublime as 'that which lifts us above ourselves and which at the same time makes us aware of our exalted state.' Kant pointed out that the exaltation comes from the sense that though we may feel overwhelmed, we also grasp what we cannot hold; we apprehend something beyond our ability to comprehend. We are thrilled by our own powers as well as by nature's.
This is still humbling. The sublime defines our limits as well as our possibilities. Perhaps that is also one difference between museums and natural preserves: museums focus on human possibilities; nature can reveal our limitations. These contrasts may even echo the differences between beauty and the sublime that Edmund Burke once described. Museums are the domain of human beauty; preserves the domain of the sublime. Burke described the sublime as vast, beauty small; the sublime as rugged, beauty smooth."
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