“The West, one could pithily summarise, is bright; it not only brings with it the illumination of the Enlightenment, but also lights up every street, every town, every room with dazzling lamps, so that every single object will for evermore be sharp and delineated. The East, conversely, prefers to allow things to emerge only vaguely from the background, to hold their mutability and fragmentariness as their defining qualities, so that it would be considered the peak of aesthetic experience to catch only a glimmer of an object. How vulgar the clearly visible object that pretends it could exist independently of its context; how glorious the twilight that strips away the substance of things, their unanswerable persuasive power, their obvious worldliness.”