With reference to my previous post entitled ‘Desk space’, allow me to draw your attention to this passage that I’ve just come across…
…in her office where there were such quantities of lecture notes, letters and other documents lying around that it was like standing amidst a flood of paper. On the desk, which was both the origin and the focal point of this amazing profusion pf paper, a virtual paper landscape had come into being in the course of time, with mountains and valleys. Like a glacier when it reaches the sea, it had broken off at the edges and established new deposits all around on the floor, which in turn were advancing imperceptibly towards the centre of the room… It once occurred to me that at dusk, when all of this paper seemed to gather into itself the pallor of the fading light, it was like snow in the fields, long ago, beneath the ink black sky.
W.G. Sebald’s ‘The Rings of Saturn’
