A few years ago, a video of a double rainbow in a national park went viral, largely because of the exclamations from the man behind the camera who kept asking himself in a wondering tone “what does it MEAN?” and eventually, crying and laughing with excess emotion. And it was funny, but when I thought about it, it seemed to me that guy was having some kind of experience that most 19th-century Romantics would kill for; I though of the paintings of Friedrich first off. It wasn’t the fault of the man in this case that he couldn’t express his feelings eloquently — in any case, even a poet would likely have said something similar in the moment, and only been able to recreate the experience for others afterwards, once they’d had time to calm down and process it. When, a while back on this journal, I saw your description of Cagney as Nick Bottom (you write review something like “not even by synesthesia can he describe his experience”), I wondered whether Friedrich’s figures have their backs to us, not only so we can imagine ourselves in their place, but because any expression on their faces would seem ludicrously inadequate to the beauties they are observing.