Beautiful things … act like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to some vaster space. … We find that we are standing in a different relation to the world than we were a moment before. It is not that we cease to stand at the center of the world, for we never stood there. It is that we cease to stand even at the center of our own world. We willingly cede our ground to the thing that stands before us.

—Elaine Scarry¹