When through the water’s thickness I see the tiling at the bottom of a pool, I do not see is despite the water and the reflections there, I see it through them and because of them. If there were no distortions, no ripples of sunlight, if it were without this flesh that I saw the geometry of the tiles, then I would cease to see it as it is and where it is — which is to say, beyond any identical, specific place. I cannot say that the water itself — the aqeous power, the syrupy and shimmering element — is in space; all this is not somewhere else, either, but it is not in the pool. It inhabits it, it materializes itself there, yet it is not contained there; and if I raise my eyes toward the screen of cypresses where the web of reflections is playing, I cannot gainsay the fact that the water visits it, too, or at least sends into it, upon it, its active and living essence.
-Merleau-Ponty