There is the understander and his works, an effort and an enterprise that endows values here and ignores their possibility there. His trying out of different ideas, ways of looking, his rattling at closed doors, testing locks, diligent attention to half-remembered openings is taken for granted, because what once yielded will yield again. The effort is close to home and a part of the daily routine of sifting what comes from the outside in search of clues; it creates a near and a far, an inside and an out, a spatialisation and saliences that hold that space open. But if there are saliences there are also their shadows, less interesting regions to be passed over in order to reach more interesting ones. If what he claims to be in search of were ever to be found then he would be the first thing to vanish, he and his entire world. And from exactly where he always found nothing of interest there would be a knowing; not an understander at all but the very knowing he always presumed upon, as if he had the least clue as to what it was he was always talking about.