Ingenious experiments have been undertaken, complex studies performed, and innumerable volumes written to illuminate the concept, but ultimately it comes down to United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's statement (in a different context), "I know it when I see it".
In the hands of a lesser writer, this can create problems: the prose begins to feel self-indulgent, written not to illuminate any truths but to please the writer, and in the process, story itself is lost and the reader is left behind.
Now, of course, Samuel Beckett's friends are coming from Dublin and Belfast and London and Paris and New York to connect with his work and honour the man whose writing continues to illuminate and comfort us.
For the first eight weeks, readings in contemporary science fiction accompany lectures and formal writing assignments intended to illuminate various aspects of writing craft as well as the particular problems of writing science fiction.
What compels me to write is a desire to illuminate moments of connection and disconnection between my characters.
It is this dusha that Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chekov and Dostoyevsky, wrote of and tried to illuminate.
Woods, who wrote the episode, hoped to illuminate the connection between these two heinous eras.
Ross writes at illuminating length about John Adams's opera Nixon in China, but doesn't once mention his next work, The Death of Klinghoffer, about the murder by Palestinian terrorists of an elderly passenger on board the Achille Lauro.
"The great proliferation of historical writing has served not to illuminate the central themes of Western history but to obscure them," Bernard Bailyn complained, in 1981, in his presidential address to the American Historical Association.
As of this writing, however, the attempt to illuminate the urban layering of visible and invisible dimensions was only barely operational, and so it is hard to know what the effect will be when the artists finish tinkering with the software and hardware.
Postscript: My effort in the pieces I write for the newspapers is to illuminate their political allegiance in the light of their wholeness, i.e. the good values many of the region's conservatives live by in their non-political lives.
