The thing

The thing – The thing “transcends” our perceptions of it, not in the sense that there is anything about it which is in principle inaccessible to those perceptions, but because there is always infinitely more to it than we can take in as finite beings. It transcends in precisely the same way that a great novel or a great poem transcends our interpretations of it. There is nothing about the poem or novel that is out of our purview, no “hidden” core like a Kantian thing-in-itself: it is all right there for us, just these words on the page.