Potato eaters – five peasant women, clothed in rags, seated round a square table in a brown room. The scene is set. Outside the frame, a famous artist inspects the dim and manifold prospect… Five chairs, two forks, an oil lamp, a tablecloth, people, a kettle, wooden beams. But nothing – not a single thing – can be fully described, recorded, depicted. Every angle of vision – each perception – refuses to yield the clock’s essence, the kettle’s nature. Perturbed and de