My reading of the passage is that what we find beautiful is terrifying because having it taken away can hurt us the most. It is the most dear to us, and we love it so because it doesn't always just go away. Sometimes it lingers...
Also...I have never thought of the beautiful as the antithesis of the sublime...indeed, what I find most beautiful has more than a hint of the sublime in it (as Stanley Kubrick so eloquently demonstrated about Beethoven's 9th in the way he used it for A Clockwork Orange.
But then, I just love horror too!
"For beauty is the beginning of terror we are still able to bear, and why we love it so is because it so serenely disdains to destroy us" Rilke's First Duino Elegy
Daniel Shaw
Professor of Philosophy and Film
Lock Haven University
Managing Editor, Film and Philosophy
website: www.lhup.edu/dshaw
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