"Byzantine, a Christian empire, an architecture of heaven. Churches and other religious buildings emerged as the preeminent architectures, others faded into obscurity. A mystic image of heaven, so very opposite of the architecture of the work-a-day world outside. Devoted to reinforce religious experience, the familiar physical world of human sensation is transformed into a suggestion of the transcendental world. Images of conventional reality, captured in the glittering mosaics, evoke a spiritual presence in an otherworldly atmosphere of shimmering light from countless windows, reflected from high mosaic-lined domes. Alas, the early Christian and Byzantine liturgy celebrated the fusion of secular and religious rule and the endeavor to create a heaven on earth."

For I, a man, the measure and measurer of all things, stand so small and insignificant against the sheer monumentality of Thee dome, the geometrical perfection of the circle, the indisputable perfection of God. It seems as though it is a case of being minor and irrelevant. To being concerned of the life in the hereafter, and not with the here and now. To being mysticized, instead of embracing and being comprised. The human spirituality of being forever the outsider, and never the insider.