being shines through

The pleasures of philosophy are the pleasures of reduction—the epiphanies of hinting in a few words at complex matters. Both poetry and philosophy, for instance, are concerned with Being. What is a lyric poem, one might say, but the recreation of the experience of Being. In both cases, that need to get it down to its essentials, to say the unsayable and let the truth of Being shine through.

—Charles Simic, “Reading Philosophy at Night,” The Life of Images: Selected Prose (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2015)