these thoughts are dreams : dreams are ends in themselves . "The long silence, the vast silence, of the forest had only three sounds—the voices of the two poets and the sound of Dante's feet. Now 'the secret things—segrete cose' begin to sound. Silence is broken. As they pass the arch, they come into an air 'senza tempo tinto—tinted without time', dark and unchanging." — Charles Williams . process, it is the part of something that determines its quality but is not physically evident, it "... comes into being, like any other natural factor, in order to flourish and disappear, not to leave traces in mechanical ritual, or anthropologically interesting survivals. The function of a nutrient is to become transmuted, not to leave unaltered traces." — Idries Shah. elusiveness is therefore its currency . when the temporal dimension is collapsed, the process and the goal are given a new relationship, they are simultaneous . the elimination of the temporal dimension allows the process to become equivalent in stature to the end result : senza tempo tinto . 'like words, ... images in a poem tend to fall into overtone themes united by either their denotations or connotations.' — Ciardi : 'All metaphor is basically a way of speaking of the unkown in terms of the known. The metaphoric formula may thus be stated: X (unkown) = Y (known) ... [The poet's] contract is simple: if the reader will bring a fluent and supple mind to play upon the Y of the metaphor, the poet will engage to give him an experience of the X. But he will also undertake to give him an experience of the pleasurable interplay of X upon Y' . Charles Williams paraphrases Coleridge: 'Coleridge said that a symbol must have three characteristics (i) it must exist in itself, (ii) it must derive from something greater than itself, (iii) it must represent in itself that greatness from which it derives. I have preferred the word image to the word symbol because it seems to me doubtful if the word symbol nowadays sufficiently expresses the vivid individual existence of the lesser thing.': Ciardi:, 'The distinction between a symbol and a metaphor can not be rigidly drawn, but a symbol tends to stand for a more formal and more expansive area of meaning or of experience ... whereas a metaphor tends to be more specific and rather more sensory than conceptual. What is basic to both is the metaphoric sense. Nothing is more characteristic of poetry than this metaphoric sense.' : Kenneth Clark: 'High Gothic art can look fantastic and luxurious ... Medieval man could see things very clearly, but he believed that these appearances should be considered as nothing more than symbols or tokens of an ideal order, which was the only true reality.' . Borges: 'In the sixth chapter of the first part, the priest and the barber inspect Don Quixote's library; astoundingly, one of the books examined is Cervantes' own Galatea ...' And Borges tells that 'The barber, a dream or the form of a dream of Cervantes, passes judgement on Cervantes' . unfinished michaelangelos, to see them is to see the raw print of the chisel in the marble, the only thing left for us to be excited about : the process itself