Sublime South Africa: Nahoon

The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.
-Edmund Burke, "On the Sublime and the Beautiful"

At the Nahoon Point Nature Reserve the sublime sense I felt was aided by the information I found in the reserve’s visitor’s center. Here I read about the millions of years of life and death collected in the cliffs at Nahoon, the evidence of ancient creatures and humans embedded in the rock which had once been sand. A few minutes later, standing on those cliffs and imagining all of the years and lives that were collected into every inch of stone, and looking out into the ocean, focusing on the distant point where the sky and ocean seem to meet, but knowing that they both continue on, I couldn’t help relating the time and life collected beneath me to that constant and endless ocean and sky: so much happening in every square inch at every second, but all blended into this great, unreachable, forever blue-on-blue. It was a very powerful and overwhelming experience, one that made me feel tiny and insignificant, but also somehow greater because of my tie to this incomprehensible vastness, a vastness that I still can’t reason through and clearly can’t describe. I think that's the passion Burke described, where "the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it."