“Beauty has been so domesticated in our imaginations here,” Goodyear says. “We’ve cheapened it by making such a pop-culture product out of it, where it’s the background to every car commercial, it’s a sold image. I think that dulled the awareness that what you were looking at was a picture of danger. But anyone who thought about it for a second, or even who didn’t think about it, I believe, probably unconsciously could feel that in those pictures of the coastline in California — with the dramatic cliffs and the sparkling blue oceans — that the beauty is the danger. It is the expression of the danger, of the seismic activity, of the relationship between the water and the land, which threatens the humans who would build along that strand. You feel it there, and you call it majestic or stunning or any of the things you might call it. But what you feel is awe, and awe is terror.”