The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

"But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs, and of which Ariane was an exemplar. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs, but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves." --Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, 2009