Ziad Shihab

Quote from Sauerberg book

Not that there’s much need to remember; we are seldom defeated online in our search for what we have already found. Now we depend not on orientation to page or wall but on a set of remembered words, not necessarily in sequence. And here we participate in a relationship of some interest. We used to consult a list of books in a catalogue, which was itself a book. Hence the identity or homology of items listed with the instrument that lists. Having thus located the book in the large space of the body walking, stretching an arm, we would need to use our more specifically optical sense of space to find the passage we were looking for. (The index replicates on a small—lexical—scale the homology of the catalogue, and still leaves us to scan the page for the particular word.) By one text (in the catalogue) we are directed to another text. There are two sorts of spaces involved: the space that holds the body and through which the body must move; and the space that holds the eyes, within which only the eyes and fingers can usefully operate. Thus on a shelf somewhere in the macro-spaces of the library a body finds a book; once it’s been located our fingers work the pages and our eyes, deploying our micro-spatial sense, locate the passage on the page.