This rather astonishing and beautiful passage is from William Franke’s On What Cannot Be Said. I believe Franke is one of the most poetic academic philosophers writing today, and one of the very few who has not given up on Meaning.

“…human finitude transforms all things after its own image in an infinite process of metamorphosis. In our very evanescence is lodged our cosmic task: by saying the things that are and that vanish, we give them the present-perfect status of eternally having been, once, once and no more, never again, yet irrevocably having been.”