The chores that need doing and that I shall not have the time to do seem like opportunities for self-realization that cannot possibly be found elsewhere. And this is true enough. There will be other opportunities, but not of the same kind. What happens here is a unique fusion of the unending drama running inside my head with material objects outside me. These objects—not only furniture and paintings and books and a piano but plants and trees and stones—were in many cases chosen by me to be where they are as a function (usually unconscious) of that inner phantasmal drama; and when they weren’t chosen, I found them where they were, their existence and situation determined by others or by natural processes, twenty-five years of staring at them have made them not mine (ownership of land and landscape is a fiction) but me. The ash tree looming between the two houses, the right-angle bend in the little stair, the seepage of light and sweet dawn air through the gap left by the flatly hung Indian cloth over my bedroom window, are more what I am, certainly, than the hair growing on my chest, or the tune in my head, or the ideas in my head in fact—including these ideas about the central place filled in my being by these walls, these bordered fields, this golden-clouded sky.

Harry Mathews, 20 Lines a Day