The American National Park system is a staggering directory to all things biggest, longest, oldest and highest. Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave system is the largest in the world. Crater Lake in Oregon is the deepest body of fresh water in the US—second worldwide only to Russia’s Lake Baikal. The tallest dunes in North America are protected in Colorado and largest trees in the world tower over California’s Sequoia National Park. The golden state also boasts North America’s tallest waterfall at Yosemite, while Alaska’s Denali National Park centers around Mt. McKinley, the continent’s largest mountain.
Oddly enough, Arizona’s Grand Canyon, the quintessential Olympian in this pantheon of hugeness, cannot legitimately claim to be the largest of its kind. While the enormous fissure through the American west can be easily seen from space, that bearer of the title “largest” is yet unknown. This is due in part to the fact that large swaths of the jagged Himalayan mountain range lay beyond surveyable reach. Compounding the confusion is the fact that canyons can be measured a variety of ways—length, depth and width, as well as volume. The NPS website claims that the Grand Canyon could hold 4.17 trillion cubic meters. That’s more than seven quadrillion 20 oz. bottles of Coke, or 126 quintillion grains of rice. Or one 17 million year old serpentine river slowly chewing away at a temple of stone.
Regardless of it’s worldwide ranking, the Grand Canyon is the quintessential American geological landmark. It’s sublime views speak with an aching profundity that only comes with immense age—a perfect anchor with which to contrast and steady the young and hectic American dream. It’s unsurprising that upwards of 5 million people make the trek every year, simply to stand and gaze in awe at something that is, quite literally, mind-numbingly large.
The Grand Canyon is the first place I ever experienced the sensation I spent four years studying in college. As a philosophy major I was always drawn to the field of aesthetic philosophy, especially the point of view of the continental philosophers. Immanuel Kant’s theories on the aesthetic experience of the sublime left such a lasting impression that I decided to write my thesis about the sublime experience as related to architecture. The sublime is—to radically simplify it—a binary to beauty. To experience something so terribly large or frightening that it diminishes your own sense of self creates a dissonance between certain mental faculties of rationality and imagination. This is the pit-of-your-stomach feeling when you look out the window of a skyscraper.
I had spent years mastering the theory behind this sensation, and it was natural that I would seek it out in real life. Anything that I could connect to the sublime in any way was stretched until it fit my mental map. I was smugly finding the sublime in my everyday life—which ironically and categorically meant that I wasn’t actually seeing it anywhere.
This realization never hit me until I set foot on the south rim of the Canyon, months after I had completed my thesis. There, before me, was the essence of the word huge. The steel and glass skyscrapers that I had so painstakingly attempted to link through words to the idea of ‘towering menaces’ would easily fit one on top of the other inside the canyon and still not reach the rim.
There was nothing I could do but sit and stare—part of a mute crowd of dozens that had stopped dead in their tracks after walking through the thin row of pine trees protecting the path from the rocks beyond.
Dumbfounded, at a loss for words and thoughts, I finally experienced the sublime.
All images from www.google.com
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