A house, a home: we labour and work for shelter. We fear squalidness in all it’s forms and indenture our selves to avoid it. “Men have become the tools of their tools” (Thoreau).

When you think of some of the high flats around us, it can hardly be an accident that they are as near as one can get to an architectural representation of a filing cabinet. (Jimmy Reid, 1972)

Any building raises questions of time: the time of the building itself and the time of its “lifeworld.”

Sometimes the map seems finished: nothing more can be added; the class of forms looks closed until another patient man takes a challenge from the seemingly complete situation, and succeeds once more in enlarging it. (George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remark on the History of Things)

Indexicals roam our consciousness: content in or with respect to contexts.

Take a walk down a city street…. You have seen a person cut in two by a car, bits and pieces of street signs and advertisements, reflections from shop windows—a montage of fragments… Consciousness is a cut-up; life is a cut-up. (William Burroughs in Typewriters – Bombs – Jellyfish by Tom McCarthy)

Remember the surprise you felt: while fingering imitation flowers sitting in a vase you found yourself cheated of the sterile texture you had expected when cool life kissed your fingertips with pouting lips. Someone had placed a real flower among the imitations.

Cumulus clouds hang low and wisps hang close to the ground. Holes in the clouds let the sun through. My neighbour’s telephone is showing a dress-up fantasy drama. His ears are englobed by headphones, his hands twitch as he falls asleep, his chin falls on his chest. Silver watch and a silver wedding ring. Jeans, black synthetic jacket, reddish neck, head needs a new shave.

life: a gap, or slit, or pocket in which spinning bodies, held up, despite all odds, in a miasma of impossibility, careen for an indefinite interval across a tilted plane before heading to the floor. Kerthunk. (Tom McCarthy)

A new delay type: maintenance checks at the depot took longer than expected.

An inward turn: mouches volantes and tinnitus.

… presently that stake of olivewood was about to catch fire, green though it was, and began to glow terribly, then it was I who brought it near from the fire, and my comrades stood round me and a god breathed into us great courage. They took the stake of olivewood, sharp at the point, and thrust it into his eye, while I, through my weight upon it from above, whirled it round, as a man bores a ship’s timber with a drill, while those below keep it spinning with the strap, which they lay hold of by either end, and the drill runs unceasingly. Even so we took the fiery-pointed stake and whirled it around in his eye, and the blood flowed round it, all hot as it was. His eyelids above and below and his brows were all singed by the flame from the burning eyeball, and its roots crackled in the fire. And as when a smith dips a great axe or an adze in cold water to temper it and it makes a great hissing — for from this comes the strength of iron — so did his eye hiss round the stake of olivewood.(Odyssey 9.307-414 — Translation by A.T. Murray — A Loeb Classical Library Reader)

“I have been held at a red signal with no explanation as to why. If we receive new information we will pass it on to you.”10 seconds later the train moves again. Sometimes it is better to say nothing.