And Ejiofor gave us everything we could hope for: the dignity, the rage, the self-delusion, the sublime word-music.
The trouble with natural grandeur is that, when faced with the sublime, words fail.
Photographic reproductions of ancient sculptures create irregular and imperfect collages in Ewa Doroszenko's image series, The Promise of Sublime Words.
Enjoy the sublime words of Psalms.
But while mountains and oceans tend to be a good way into thinking about the sublime, the word also means something beyond the limits of understanding, something totally incomprehensible.
Rather, Ground Zero can only be described, in the lost meaning of a grand old word, as "sublime", in the sense of awe inspired by solemnity.
Nowadays, the word sublime – like "terrific" and "awesome" before it – is more likely to describe the flavour of an ice cream than the sights of limitless nature.
My hockey-hating brother-in-law, having stumbled onto the game, was so keyed up by the Flyers' desperate attempts to tie it up that he deployed, in a text message, the word "sublime," which I have never before heard him use to describe anything.
It was, in a word, sublime.
The results are not unlike the more-experimental earlier works of Harmony Korine or Ulrich Seidl; in a word, sublime. .
In a review of the opera that uses the word "sublime" at one point to describe Bernstein's score, Anthony Tommasini wrote of it in the Times: "The lingering criticism of "A Quiet Place" is that the piece is an awkward hybrid both musically and dramatically.
