‘Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain.  But if we describe a world to encompass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump up against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull.  For unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?) there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous.’

–Annie Dillard, “On Foot in Virginia’s Roanoke Valley”