The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. In the beginning, describing the haunting, low moan that accompanies every sunset in Area X, she writes, "The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. Throughout the novel, the biologist regards Area X and its inhabitants and structures with a sense of terrified awe suggestive of the sublime. The biologist describes her encounter with the Crawler in almost exactly these terms: "This moment, which I might have been waiting for my entire life all unknowing-this moment of an encounter with the most beautiful, the most terrible thing I might ever experience-was beyond me" (178). The experience is a mixture of beauty and terror. The sublime is that which cannot be calculated or conceptualized by the mind: something that you can never truly experience or behold, but that can only overwhelm the human mind. The sublime as a philosophical concept developed from the 18th century beginning with Edmund Burke, and was taken up by Kant and Schopenhauer into modern philosophy. VanderMeer writes with a deep interest in portraying the sublime.
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