Curtain

This essay explores the boundary between seeing and not seeing, understanding and not understanding. It begins with discussing the metaphor of the "curtain" as a twin symbol of concealment and revelation. Agatha Christie’s Curtain, the final Poirot novel, is an ample case study of this duality. The curtain is shown to represent both the limit and the lure of knowledge—what we are drawn to uncover and what perhaps should remain hidden. Further psychological observations as well as literary, biblical, and philosophical reflections—from Genesis and the Fall, through Greek thinking (Plato’s cave and Aristophanes's Clouds), to the Christian conception of divine revelation— reveal the many layers of the phenomenon of "covering" and "uncovering." Ultimately, the reader is invited to consider humanity’s paradoxical condition: our simultaneous longing for disclosure and our terror of the void behind all veils. The essay argues for a theology and metaphysics of translucency, where divine presence is not in total visibility, but in a clarity that reveals all creation as illuminated and meaningful, without collapsing mystery into nothingness.