An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches in flat countries, with spire steeples, which, as they cannot be referred to any other object, point as with silent finger to the sky and star.

A single vertical in a flat landscape does more than a hundred would in mountains. Meaning comes from contrast: when there is nothing else to compare a thing to, it stands for something entirely on its own. That is true of gestures as well as buildings. One serious remark in a room of jokes, one act of care in an indifferent week, carries weight it could never have among its own kind.

Consider where you might place a single deliberate thing rather than many. One handwritten note, one uninterrupted hour, one clear stand taken. In flat surroundings, very little is needed to point.