"Is a verbal vision possible? Do not words, written or oral, interpose their opacity between readers and their visual experience of the world? Can language be effaced as such to the point where it become transparent to things, and can it from that point on display the thing itself in its truth even as it offers to the dazzled eye its simulacrum and its presence?" - Louis Marin, "Mimesis and Description," On Representation, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001): 64-84, 78-79.