‘Description is fueled by HUNGER for the world, the need to taste, to name, to claim what’s seen, to bring it, as Rilke would put it, “O endlessly into ourselves.” But it would be simplistic to conceive of such hunger as simply celebratory or affirmative; that is part of it, but it’s very often true that what we are compelled to describe is terrible, or oppressive, or heartbreaking. Language is hungry for that, too. It wants, as it were, to eat everything. Even the falling and fading world, even misery.’

– Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word