etc etc. note taking under a pseudonym

The ideal of leisure or the ideal of struggle.
Mountains and strange lands are there as a challenge, to be conquered.

The rise of the individual man. And from the Age of Reason to the Age of Empire.

Why do people choose danger when comfort and safety are on offer? The military esthetic and the military ethic are inseparable, a formally rigorous ordering of the world and our place in it. A Gandhian esthetic and ethic or a banker's, the same holds.

Questions regarding the sublime are questions regarding the human desire for ecstatic experience, balance risked, lost and not always regained. Evolutionary questions. An old friend said she married for safety and found someone of stronger genetic stock for breeding.

Esthetics are the material presentation of an ethic. "Aestheticism" is something else entirely and minor art.

The sublime is the perceived manifestation of transcendent order. The sympathetic audience for an artwork takes the experience of the work as being akin to the response to that supreme order itself: deathless.
Mondrian's Neoplatonism. The seductions of visual rhetoric.  Stendhal moments. I've teared up in front of paintings a few times. 5 or 6. I get dizzy once or twice a year. Hazards of the job.

Drug dealers are users too. Con men have dreams

The sense that the world 'means something', that 'we're not alone', that there is a god etc. Mathematicians see numbers as sublime.

It's all lovely BS.