In the his­to­ry of aes­thet­ics, the idea of “the sub­lime” has a long pedi­gree, and its mean­ing has been debat­ed through­out the cen­turies by gen­er­a­tions of artists, writ­ers, poets and musi­cians seek­ing to evoke the term. It has many shades of mean­ing but has his­tor­i­cal­ly referred to things that are exalt­ed as some­thing beyond nor­mal human expe­ri­ence and reach­ing deeply into the human emo­tion­al make-up, whether that some­thing be archi­tec­ture, ideas, lan­guage, style, art or nature.

These days, though, the word sub­lime is applied in every­day lan­guage to almost any­thing that can be refined to the high­est point, such as a per­fect­ly exe­cut­ed goal in foot­ball, or an exquis­ite­ly cooked meal. In this blog, I will be tak­ing this mod­ern sense of “high excel­lence” as applied to the var­ied worlds of art, music, film, tele­vi­sion, the­atre, opera, and lit­er­a­ture. I will share with you exam­ples from these worlds — those “occa­sion­al glimpses of the sub­lime” — that will hope­ful­ly move, thrill, amaze, amuse, or at least inter­est you by virtue of their excel­lence or cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance. Join me on what I hope will be an edi­fy­ing and reward­ing jour­ney…