The word “ineffability” is first cousin to the French expression “je ne sais quoi,” both in the area of literal taste – in gastronomy, say – or in the reception of a work of art. In its primary meaning, then, “ineffability” suggests a certain something that exceeds our linguistic grasp. A secondary meaning associates the term with the Bible, where it occurs in formulations such as “the ineffable name of Jehovah,” which is taboo. Ineffability's connection to both religion and art brings to mind Walter Benjamin's notion of “aura.” Benjamin connects aura with the traditional artwork, which, in its earliest forms, was a cult object used in ritual. To the term “aura” there accrue multiple definitions in Benjamin's writing: time and again he encircles it with descriptive language that never fully grasps it, that never fully elucidates its meaning. In The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility, aura famously appears as a “strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be,” a formulation that likely derives its terms from Georg Simmel's observation that “all art brings about a distancing from the immediacy of things: it allows the concreteness of stimuli to recede and stretches a veil between us and them just like the fine bluish haze that envelops the mountains.” But when for Simmel, I suggest, a veil stretches between observer and the work of art – when he describes it as enshrouded by a veil — Benjamin, in turn, relies on a Romantic metaphor from a fragment by Novalis, Die Lehrlinge zu Sais (1798).