*    *     *

      Who has seen the wind?
      Neither you nor I:
      But when the trees bow down their heads,
      The wind is passing by.

Who recited that poem to me as a child, my mother or father? I only just discovered that it’s by Christina Rosetti. But whether or not wind is, like breath, a made thing (made by what agent?), its evidence is indirect. Presence by its very nature is so often manifest and oblique at the same time—like wind, a perception that begs its own question.

It’s not merely a rhetorical question to ask what we are to do in with and in response to that experience we encounter as irreconcilable with reason. This is a matter that lives at the heart of ethics, of art, of any sort of relation.