“But slowly the phosphorescence of the springlike snow became dulled: it vanished then, giving way to a thick black darkness preceding dawn. Some of us fell asleep in the warm snow, others went groping in the dark for the doors of their houses and walked blindly into the sleep of their parents and brothers, into a continuation of deep snoring . . . . ” –Bruno Schulz in the short story “Cinnamon Shops” (published in The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, Penguin 2008)
This experiment simply focused on placing quotes from fiction into the environment. In this particular version, the correlation between quote and situation is quite direct. It labels the snow as warm, according to Schulz’s quote above. Another direct correlation is that Schulz grew up in Ukraine, which was once part of Poland. In this picture, “warm” is written in the snow covering the park that rings Krakow’s old town.
Does painting the environment with a quote make the reader’s experience of an author’s idea more immediate?
