From Krzhizhanovsky's "The Unbitten Elbow"

     It began like this: The fashionable speaker Eustace Kint, who rose to fame through the ears of elderly but wealthy ladies, was taken by friends after a birthday lunch -- by chance, on a lark -- to the circus. A professional philosopher, Kint caught the elbow-eater's metaphysical meaning right off the bat. The very next morning he sat down to write an article on "The Principles of Unbitability."

     Kint, who only a few years before had trumped the tired motto "Back to Kant" with his new and now wildly popular "Forward to Kint," wrote with elegant ease and rhetorical flourishes. (He once remarked, to thunderous applause, that "philosophers, when speaking to people about the world, see the world, but they do not see that their listeners, located in that same world, five steps away from them, are bored to tears.") After a vivid description of the man-verus-elbow contest, Kint generalized the fact and, hypostatizing it, dubbed this act "metaphysics in action."

     The philosopher's thinking went like this: Any concept (Begriff, in the language of the great German metaphysicians) comes lexically and logically from greifen (to grasp, grip, bite). But any Begriff, when thought through to the end, turns into Grenzbegriff, or boundary concept, that eludes comprehension and cannot be grasped by the mind, just as one's elbow cannot be grasped by one's teeth. "Furthermore," Kint's article continued, "in objectifying the unbitable outside, we arrive at the idea of the transcendent: Kant understood this too, but he did not understand that the transcendent is also immanent (manus -- 'hand,' hence, also 'elbow'); the immanent-transcendent is always in the 'here,' extremely close to the comprehending and almost part of the apperceiving apparatus, just as one's elbow is almost within reach of one's grasping jaws. But the elbow is 'so near and yet so far,' and the 'thing-in-itself' is in every self, yet ungraspable. Here we have an impassable almost," Kint concluded, "an 'almost' personified by the man in the sideshow trying very hard to bite his own elbow. Alas, each new round inevitably ends in victory for the elbow: The man is defeated -- the transcendent triumphs. Again and again -- to bellows and whistles from the boorish crowd -- we are treated to a crude but vividly modeled version of the age-old gnoseological drama. Go one, go all, hurry to the tragic sideshow and consider this most remarkable phenomenon; for a few coins you can have what cost the flower of humanity lives."