The lotus communicates in its wholeness, in its organic indissociability from the turbid ooze of the reality in which it is rooted, and as an expression of all-that-is, only when we find ourselves quiet and still among beings (inter esse), with an “inter/est” which is no idle curiosity, nor even the insistent passion to “know,” but an openness, a wonder, which as Burke discerns, “is the originary question that the look addresses to the world, but, unlike the questions of cognition, does so without expectation or demand . . . Indeed, “[t]he philosopher’s manner of question is . . . not that of cognition”. We cannot wrest the secret, extract the secret. Yet . . . this openness, this wonder, the authentic vitality of the question, “provides a reflective and intuitive access to Being which philosophers of intuition and reflection quickly sought to close up by trying to prove that the answer was already contained in the question . . . Both intuition and reflection, as commonly understood, assume a domain to be dis/covered, dis/closed, un/veiled, in effect, denuded. But the repudiation of disclosure, of a presence prior to presentation (a being, in Heidegger’s idiom, prior to Being), prior, in fact, to the demand for disclosure . . . is not the occasion for despair.