> The fascination of the sublime is in its power to overwhelm or destroy us -
> in art, Shelley's Mont Blanc, Jameson's Hotel Bonaventure, or even, as Tom
> Weiskel argued in The Romantic Sublime, noisy rock and roll. Or in life,
> cigarettes. It's precisely their danger that some people find attractive.
> And the more they're demonized, the more people, especially younger people,
> are drawn to them. The attraction has nothing to do with the reasonable
> evaluation of risk/reward ratios. They're a way of flirting with death.
> This is something that public health professionals and mental hygienists
> don't understand.
>
> Doug
When I was a teenager, my friends smoked 'cuz all the cool kids did it, and the chicks dug it. Fascination of the sublime had very little to do with it.
Maybe I just had very shallow friends.
-- Enrique Diaz-Alvarez Office # (607) 255 5034 Electrical Engineering Home # (607) 272 4808 112 Phillips Hall Fax # (607) 255 4565 Cornell University mailto:enrique at ee.cornell.edu Ithaca, NY 14853 http://peta.ee.cornell.edu/~enrique