“Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable.

Elaine Scarry in On Beauty And Being Just

Ms. Scarry notices that a dazzling vision often begets movements of the hands, perhaps to sketch the scene or attempt a photograph. In another situation, a woman might prompt a companion to reach out to lightly stroke her skin, and that hand moves with its own exquisite grace; a splendid smile returns from the one caressed, and so the replication of beauty goes on. It is as fundamental and primal as our propensity for gazing at things in the world — looking. A glimpse of a beautiful place (or person) compels a desire for another look, and another, and so the instants go on reproducing. These urges overtook me when I saw this lagoon near the end of day. I recorded impression after impression, moved along the bank, then back and forth as far as time and circumstance allowed. Our author mentions this activity in her little book; she calls it: “the willingness continually to revise one’s location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty.”