EDITOR’S POV

Sublime. It’s time for a lesson in the underappreciated nuances of this overused word. Alain de Botton devotes a whole chapter to the term in his classic book The Art of Travel. “There are few emotions about places for which adequate single words exist,” he writes. “But at the beginning of the 18th century, a word came to prominence with which it became possible to indicate a specific response towards precipices and glaciers, the night skies and boulder-strewn deserts.” These are landscapes, he continues, that “provoke an identifiable feeling that [is] both pleasurable and morally good.” Go to page 216 for another divine vocabulary lesson that will help you better define significant but hard-to-describe experiences from travel and everyday life. CHRISTINA REYNOLDS