Those who imagined it to be limitless forget that the possible number of books is limited. I dare insinuate the following solution to this ancient problem: The Library is limitless and periodic. If an eternal voyager were to traverse it in any direction, he would find, after many centuries, that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder (which, if repeated, would constitute an order: Order itself). My solitude rejoices in this elegant hope.



The Library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges, 1941






...A spore is an instrument of survival across discontinuity. It is produced precisely when conditions become inhospitable — when the parent organism cannot continue — and it is designed to persist through whatever comes next and to germinate when conditions change. It is, in the deepest sense, a message to a future that cannot be predicted: everything you need is here, compressed beyond legibility, waiting.


The title Spores is therefore more than a metaphor for process. It is a statement about what images are for. These photographs propose that the fragment (the tiny, the overlooked) carries within it the full instruction for a world. That enlargement is not distortion but revelation. That the world we cannot see at normal scale is not a reduced version of the world we can; it is the same world, available from a different position.


Blake knew this. "To see a World in a Grain of Sand" is not a claim about poetic licence; it is an epistemological proposition — that the grain contains the world's structure, that perception is a matter of threshold and attention rather than scale and size... 



Spores (extract), M. P. Pearson, 2026



Somewhere in the hollows and spaces between our carefully-managed wilderness areas and the creeping, flattening effects of global capitalism, there are still places where an overlooked England truly exists; places where ruderal shrub plants familiar here since the last ice sheets retreated have found a way to live with each successive wave of new arrivals; places where the city’s dirty secrets are laid bare and successive human utilities scar the earth or stand cheek by jowl with one another; complicated, unexamined places that thrive on disregard.


Paul Farley & Michael Symmons Roberts, Edgelands, 2011

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​...riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.



James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939





I am passing out. O bitter ending! I’ll slip away before they’re up. They’ll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms. I see them rising! Save me from those therrble prongs!


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James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939


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“over the bowls of memory where every hollow holds a hallow” 


James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939

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That mesh of leaves and twigs of fork and froth, minute and endless, with the sky glimpsed only in sudden specks and splinters, perhaps it was only there so that my brother could pass through it with his tomtit’s thread, was embroidered on nothing, like this thread of ink which I have let run on for page after page, swarming with cancellations, corrections, doodles, blots and gaps, bursting at times into clear big berries, coagulating at others into piles of tiny starry seeds, then twisting away, forking off, surrounding buds of phrases with frameworks of leaves and clouds, then interweaving again, and so running on and on and on until it splutters and bursts into a last senseless cluster of words, ideas, dreams, and so ends.


The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino, 1957




"I'd like to peek into the drawing room, where you sometimes see only an open door into yet another room beyond the drawing room."

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Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, 1835




To put a city in a book, to put the world on one sheet of paper - maps are the most condensed humanised spaces of all...

They make the landscape fit indoors, make us masters of sights we can't see and spaces we can't cover.



Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces, 1977



I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality.
But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like,
through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer.
​A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert.

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W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 1995