I put three pieces of bark on a sheet of paper. I looked. I looked, thinking that looking might help me read something never written.
Georges Didi-Huberman, Bark

He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.
Walter Benjamin, Excavation and memory