The Identity of the Terrible and Happiness: On the Sublime in Art and Psychoanalysis1

In a letter to his friend Margot Sizzo, dated April 12, 1923, Rilke (2009, pp. 222-223) thematizes the essence of the aesthetics of the sublime:

More and more in my life and in my work I am guided by the effort to correct our old repressions, which have removed and gradually estranged from us the mysteries out of whose abundance our lives might become truly infinite. It is true that these mysteries are dreadful, and people have always drawn away from them. But where can we find anything sweet and glorious in life that would never wear this mask, the mask of the dreadful? Life — and we know nothing else —, isn't life itself dreadful? But as soon as we acknowledge its dreadfulness (not as opponents: what kind of match could we be for it?), but somehow with a confidence that this very dreadfulness may be something completely ours, though something that is just now too great, too vast, too incomprehensible for our learning hearts —: as soon as we accept life's most terrifying dreadfulness, at the risk of perishing from it (i.e., from our own Too-much!) —: then an intuition of blessedness will open up for us and, at this cost, will be ours. Whoever does not, sometime or other, give his full consent, his full and joyous consent, to the dreadfulness of life, can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence; can only walk on its edge, and one day, when the judgment is given, will have neither been alive nor dead. To show the identity of dreadfulness and bliss, these two faces on the same divine head, indeed this one single face, which just presents itself this way or that, according to our distance from it or the state of mind in which we perceive it —: this is the true significance and purpose of the Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. (Quoted from Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell, Vintage International, 2009)