  In Heidegger’s view, then, for a great artwork to work—that is, for it to help focus and preserve a meaningful “world” for an  audience[62]—this artwork must maintain an essential tension between the world of meanings it pulls together and the more mysterious phenomenon of the “earth.” Earth, in his analysis, both informs and sustains this meaningful world and also resists being interpretively exhausted by it, thereby allowing a great artwork quietly to maintain the sanctity of the inexhaustible within the very world of meanings it conveys.