Vastations in Space and Time

http://oook.info/blog/?p=3321
    …The moment of feeling the pleasure of beauty or the fear of sublimity… [quoting Adorno] “the moment in which recipients forget themselves and disappear into the work; it is the moment of being shaken. The recipients lose their footing [and] the possibility of truth, embodied in the aesthetic image, becomes tangible.” (Stimson pp 25, 26)

I have occasionally felt that frisson, recently in coming upon a wall of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s images at Pier 24 in San Francisco, and also with a few of Paul Caponigro’s prints. One simply falls into the images and is vastated, never quite the same afterwards. 



https://historycambridge.org/james/James%206.html
In 1844, while living in England, Henry James Sr. was sitting alone one evening when he had the defining spiritual experience of his life, which he would come to interpret as a Swedenborgian "vastation," a stage in the process of spiritual regeneration. James's "vastation" initiated a spiritual crisis that lasted two years, and was finally resolved through exploring the work of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772)

of the James family:
https://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/jam1rev.html
The father had suffered a Swedenborgian vastation, a seizure of "a perfectly insane and abject terror." Henry Jr. speaks in similar terms of a "vast visitation"; William experienced his own vastation, "a horrible fear of my own existence"; Alice had hallucinations and a horror of life throughout her days. 


HELL AND PURGATORY STRINDBERG
Evert Sprinchorn
Scandinavian Studies
Vol. 50, No. 4 (AUTUMN 1978), pp. 371-380
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40917826