Numbering Sands, IV

We can only see so far; our vision is limited in time and space and may be said to be bounded by experience and by the magnetic distortions of circumstance : but, it is false to say we are limited in our ability to perceive or even to invent reality, as it may serve or fall to us, unfair and inflammatory to say that a minimum element of blindness fits by necessity into our character : it is an unfair leap of rhetoric and of reasoning, because by reasoning and by imagination, we can, actually, reach not so much conclusions as beginnings that will lead to more wide-ranging and healthfully inferred understanding; we can communicate the unlikely or the sublime in such ways that it takes on a fabric of living and being lived in the world, among and in contact with the other, harder resources that propel our minds toward an understanding of what and when and by whom...

this is long-fought, hard-won crux and import, this is the place of oracles and simple phrases, the mystic unruly patterning of somethiing we will come to think of as prescribed : to return from great centers of world culture, to return laden with the smoke of winter or an old continent, with the voices and draping melody of two cities in the civil fog, to begin again to know that within this place there is a basic shape of a world not unaware but half-startled by itself : so hard to say what meaning is, or what meaning there might be, or why one face or another appears at the necessary moment, so hard to say we've located the link in the chain, or the thread that genuinely reaches into the ether, to recover something vibrating to a pulse no one can discern...