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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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I keep running accross references to Plato's Cave these days. (A quick refresher: the world is a cave with a bunch of people constrained to stay in it, all facing one way. Shadows flicker on the wall from the doorway and the constrained cave dwellers mistake those shadows for the real [ideal] forms that generate them, because the shadows are all they know, and all they are capable of seeing.)
Some people are both frustrated and motivated by the philosophical (some would say physiological) impossibility of seeing the world as it is. I love very much this passage below from Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, MacMillan Publishing Company, 1977. pp.70. I see it as an elegant attempt at the impossible task of finding words to describe something that cannot even be properly perceived.
He squinted hard, sorry that he hadn't had time for an hour's nap before his important business. And then it hit him. [...] It was as though he were in a different world. A million odors cascaded in on him at once—sharp, sweet, metallic, gentle, dangerous ones, as crude as cobblestones, as delicate and complex as watch mechanisms, as huge as a house and as tiny as a dust particle. The air became hard, it developed edges, surfaces, and corners, like space was filled with huge stiff balloons, slippery pyramids, gigantic prickly crystals, and he had to push his way through it all, making his way in a dream through a junk store stuffed with ancient, ugly furniture...It lasted a second. He opened his eyes and everything was gone. It hadn't been a different world—it was this world turning a new, unknown side to him. This side was revealed to him for a second and then disappeared, before he had time to figure it out.