Carolyn Kunin wrote: "I just ran across the
often quoted statement VN made regarding his belief in a transcendent
reality: "I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can
express would not have been expressed, had I not known more."... It's the second
"not" that throws me....
The engraver Escher once indicated that the reality
he perceived could not be expressed in words and he used brush and bezel to draw
what he saw.
Perhaps VN, like Escher, might have used words as a
pen with which he could shape what he saw lying beyond verbal thought.
VN didn't trust words ( he was rather explicit
about that in S.O, or S.M or in his lecture on Joyce or... in all
three...no time to check) . Negation ( "not", double
negation),paradox, contradiction and empty spaces are an
integral part of his pattern. We cannot see what he saw, though. We
must try and see through "voids" of our
own.