Recently, a friend brought to my attention the fiction of Bruno Shulz (1892-1942), a Polish artist and writer who died in the Second World War.

Below is the third paragraph from The Republic of Dreams (1939), as translated by Walter Arndt:

"The garden plots at the outskirts of town are planted as if at the world's edge and look across their fences into the infinity of the anonymous plain. Just beyond the tollgates the map of the region turns nameless and cosmic like Canaan. Above that thin forlorn shipper of land a sky deeper and broader than anywhere else, a sky like a vast gaping dome many stories high, full of unfinished frescos and improvisations, swirling draperies and violent ascensions, opens up once again."