A Touch of Reality

"A sightseeing trip to Rome leaves Claire Creffield yearning for a proper acquaintance with the ancient city. But she finds that “‘the real Rome’” was doomed to be always elsewhere: “when I am reading about it, I can imagine it lurking in fallen buildings, and when I finally get to see the fallen buildings, it runs coquettishly away back into the books.” This leads her to meditate on yearning, religious and secular, for an unmediated grasp of reality. She concludes by describing how philosophy most comprehensively embodies the secular craving for knowledge of the real." -The Philosophers' Magazine, Stone Links: Answerable Questions - NYTimes.com