“To me, the board has always been profoundly three-dimensional, an effect enhanced by the chalk dust which drifts up from the tray, or is inadequately removed when the slate is washed, so that its normal blue-black monochrome is full of subtle variations, grays which suggest faraway galaxies or a nebula’s gaseous clouds. And when I begin to draw a line across a freshly cleaned section, my hand follows the chalk in, as though like fish it swam there, and then, in the curve of an encircled word, it returns toward its source, and the simpler surface of the classroom world. That may be one reason why I lose my way while spelling the most common terms, for the letters will not remain in a row on the same plane as the do on the page, but sink or rise or float away, becoming curlicues and bows of string, whorls of suspended weed in which I lose all sense of the word’s original identity.”

—William H. Gass, The Tunnel (1995)