there's no cheese and crackers in prison, gromit!

(Now the line reminds me of Rilke “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror...” (Duino Elegies) so a shoutout)

Edmund Burke (1757) makes the famous distinction:

• Beauty is what is gentle, harmonious, proportioned. It soothes, it pleases, it invites love.

• The Sublime is what overwhelms. It’s vast, dark, terrifying, incomprehensible. It doesn’t soothe — it shakes you. And paradoxically, that shaking feels meaningful, even ecstatic.

Kant (1790) tightens this:

• The sublime is when your imagination fails to grasp something (infinity, chaos, annihilation), but your reason insists there must be some order, some law.

• That gap between your limits and your longing for structure is what makes you feel awe. It’s thrilling but also humbling — you confront both your smallness and your strange dignity as a creature who wants meaning anyway.

And then Nietzsche (my beloved) the Apollonian and the Dionysian

Apollonian: Order, proportion, clarity, individuation, the illusion that life is coherent

Dionysian: Chaos, dissolution of self, terror, ecstasy, Revelation that life is suffering and flux

Nietzsche sees Greek tragedy as the perfect blend of these:

Apollonian form imposed on Dionysian content.

The beautiful form makes the terrifying truth (sublime suffering, chaos) bearable, even aesthetic.

Nietzsche sees beauty (Apollonian) as illusion—but not in a purely negative way.

It’s a necessary illusion that allows us to live.

The human mind needs form, clarity, narrative. Beauty offers a veil over the horror of existence.

But:

The Dionysian is the raw truth—the sublime horror and ecstasy of life without masks.

True art (and thus beauty) for Nietzsche, is not comfort, but confrontation.

Tragedy unites both: the audience sees the horror (Dionysian) but is transformed by it through form (Apollonian).

what looks beautiful often contains the sublime terror of existence, just beneath the surface.

➤ Tartt’s “Beauty is terror” is the collapse of the Apollonian mask—when you realize that what is “beautiful” is also wild, ecstatic, even deadly.

And it’s funny because it has always been right in front of us (or maybe only now I realise it) the class try to unveil the Apollonian mask and confront the chaos.

Now while we understand the philosophical background it gets complicated once w take into account the “human nature”.

So was it the class’s pure intention to lose control and confront the chaos or was it…dare I say another performance?

With the right words and references you can justify anything. Julian would have presented it as something divine, a raw and honest experience and theoretically it is. But does each character’s reasoning to participate make it…impure?

Was it an honest attempt to see the truth and if yes then why like this? Is it honest or it is on purpose ritualistic?

Why would a control freak like Henry someone who actively tried to structure chaos chooses to let go of control in that way? Maybe it’s the only way he can justify it or maybe it’s a performance. And why did the others accept? Charles and Francis use Henry as their anchor. We treat it as weakness (it’s a choice) but it proves how they’re not willing or even capable of facing something unfiltered and raw (because they already hide behind their fingers and their own structures of order).

My take is that it might have started as a performance but they did reach that point and that scared them. The death of Bunny just accelerated their decent it might even have been unnecessary. After the murder of the farmer they all coped one way or another (just like they coped with the incest and Francis/charles weird dynamic) . But when Bunny found out instead of suppressing what they experienced they were forced to face it. He reminded them the truth they saw, the same truth they then ignored and kept on performing.