"In any and every site of this country [Japan], there occurs a special organization of space: . . . no enclosure (except very low ones) and yet I am never besieged by the horizon (and its whiff of dreams): no craving to swell the lungs, to puff up the chest to make sure of my ego, to constitute myself as the assimilating center of the infinite: brought to the evidence of an empty limit, I am limitless without the notion of grandeur. . . . The place has no other limit than its carpet of living sensations, of brilliant signs (flowers, windows, foliage, books)."--Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs