In a treatise published in 1757, Edmund Burke, an Irish essayist and statesman, outlined the differences between the beautiful and the sublime.

Beautiful objects, he posited, are smooth, polished and comparatively small. Sublime objects, on the other hand, are vast, rugged, powerful, magnificent.

“They are indeed ideas of a very different nature,” he wrote, beauty being founded on pleasure, and sublimity being founded on pain.

Nine hours into a hike in Switzerland’s Lauterbrunnen Valley, having ascended to an elevation of 7,400 feet and standing, breathless, outside a tiny remote hut perched at the edge of a precipice, with dull echoes of avalanching ice (at first, registering as thunder) filling the Alpine air, I felt as though I finally appreciated the distinction — which is to say I felt a curious amalgam of fear, serenity, exhaustion and awe. (Not to mention pain.)