Does the extravagant nature of everything in this cold universe ever make you scratch your head?

I mean, the ridiculousness of the world and all. It all seems like a lot of trouble to go to for nothing.

And it’s odd that it is all beautiful. For what is beauty anyway?

I think, we are incalculably precious, if you want to know the truth.

Nothing else explains our little planet, and our very existence, enough to let me sleep at night.

If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go.

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim At Tinker Creek