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Terror
"Expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life"
Horror
"contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them"
The Terror/Horror distinction was first made in Ann Radcliffe's essay 'On the
Super-natural in Poerty', first published in 1826. This distinction is a classification
in the definition of the sublime made by Edmund Burke:
"Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite to idea of pain, and danger, that
is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible
objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime;
that is, it is productive of the strongest emotions which the mind is capable
of feeling...". The contradiction to this definition to the sublime is the picturesque.
Stim
"a point of stimulation"
Dross
" a space that is ignored, a wasted space"
Stim & dross are terms coined by Lars Lerup. Here are some quotes from his Book
'After the City' (2000).
"The metropolis, like the surface of a lake during a rainstorm pocked by thousands
of concentric ripples, is bombarded by a million stims that flicker on and off
during the city's rhythmic cycles."
"Pools of cooled air dot the plane, much like oases in deserts. Precariously
pinned in place by machines and human events, these pools become points of stimulation-stims-
on this otherwise rough but uninflected hide, populated only by the dross-the
ignored, undervaluated, unfortunate residues of the metropolitan machine. Space
as value, as locus of events, as genius loci, is then reduced to interior space,
a return to the cave. In these enclaves or stims, time is kept at bay, suspension
is the rule, levitation the desire..."