That is the title of the new and very stimulating essay by Nabeel Qureshi . It is difficult to summarize, but here is one excerpt:

2. Great art contains multiple overlapping layers of echoes.

This is often harder to spot in verbal artifacts, but it is this feature that I think distinguishes really good works of art from merely ‘ok’ ones.

Most of us are familiar with the surface level ways of doing this: rhyme, for example, knits together different lines of a poem in a semantically irrelevant way that nevertheless makes it feel like part of a unifying whole. Same with assonance and other such effects most of us are familiar with from English class. It is echoes, for example, that make so many verses from the King James Bible so pleasing and beautiful to listen to:

“Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.” (Isaiah 60:1)

Note the echoing vowel sounds throughout in ‘arise’, ‘shine’, ‘light’, and ‘thy’.…