SOURCE: Miller, Jerome A. “Vertigo and Genuflection: A Philosophical Meditation.” Modern Age 31, nos. 3-4 (summer-fall 1987): 369-77.

In the following essay, Miller provides an existentialist perspective on Tolstoy's novella.

Edmund Burke observes in his essay on our experience of the sublime and the beautiful “that height is less grand than depth; and that we are more struck at looking down from a precipice, than at looking up at an object of equal height.”¹ Yet he immediately confesses, “I am not very positive about this.” Modernity is not known for its images of the beautiful. But we know all about precipices. Whatever faults one might find in the great voices and visionaries of modernity—from Nietzsche to Bergman, from Van Gogh to Heidegger—one cannot accuse them of having shied away from the abyss. Even if we are horrified by the nihilistic consequences that often seem to flow from it...