“The most important thing in my life is this little book,” de Cardenas declares. “It’s a first edition from the 1700s of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and everything I do references it in some way. Unlike Kant who talks about the sublime in abstract terms, Burke, who was a political columnist, wrote about it like an academic. He parses out the things that are sublime — intricacy, a very large or small scale, things that are otherness, things that are indeterminable or unquantifiable — and describes the sublime as this directly affective response to a visual thing, defining the mechanisms that produce and process it.” The Post-It, which de Cardenas found inside the book, says ‘To do list: Emails.’ And the panoramic photo he took at Bryce Canyon in Utah, a good example of the sublime.