From deep inside a dark room, one looks at the window. Paper is pasted over each square divided by the lattice, and the afternoon outside has been carried whole onto that paper. The shadows made by overlapping leaves gather toward the bottom, and the upper part remains white.
Had it been glass, the trees and the sky would have been visible as they are. Paper erases form and leaves only light and dark. The outlines of the leaves have blurred, yet the fact that the leaves are trembling is all the clearer. Only one narrow band crossing the middle shows its grain like frost, announcing that a material other than paper has been set in there.
Papering the window was housekeeping repeated once each season. It means living while pasting up again each year something thin and easily torn. Here is a house that chose to mend often, in place of choosing a material that lasts long.
Between the wall that blocks light and the glass that lets light through, there is paper that takes light in. The room is this dark not because the window is narrow. It is because the light that came in was softened once as it passed through a single sheet of paper.
There is a reason the shadows gather toward the bottom. In the hours when the sun hangs high, the light falls almost from above, bends as it passes the leaves, and settles on the lower part of the window. The upper squares look white and empty because at that angle there were no leaves to block the light. Paper takes in only what it can take in.
Looking at the photograph again, the shadows on the white surface are not still. Even at the moment the shutter was pressed, the leaves were moving, and the paper was taking that movement onto its own surface.
