Walls/ George Perec

I put a picture up on a wall. Then I forget there is a wall. I no longer know what there is behind this wall, I no longer know there is a wall, I no longer know this wall is a wall, I no longer know what a wall is. I no longer know that in my apartment there are walls and that if there weren’t any walls, there would be no apartment. The wall is no longer what delimits and defines the place where I live, that which separates it from the other places where other people live, it is nothing more than a support for the picture. But I also forget the picture, I no longer look at it, I no longer know how to look at it. I have put the picture on the wall; I forget the picture, too. There are pictures because there are walls. But walls kill pictures. So we need continually to be changing, either the wall or the picture, to be forever putting other pictures up on walls, or else constantly moving the picture from one wall to another.
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We could write on walls (as we sometimes write on the fronts of houses, or fences round building sites and on the walls of prisons), but we do it only very rarely.

*Perec Georges, “The Apartment”, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces( Penguin Classics, London, 2008), P.39.