But trust me, that heaping mound of dust and dead bug-encrusted "I'm going to do something with these someday, I swear" papers piled under your bedroom window?
When many people were thinking of leaving, the owner raised this house from a heap of dust and rubble.
It, too, is of legs, although these are not the legs of an American nymphette but of a group of people standing around a heap of dust.
Freud was a heap of dust by the time Microsoft Word came along, but does his point hold for modern writers?
Motionless at the edge of the ravine, they were miles from the city and the wide flat river that snaked into the glow, where the sun smoldered in a towering heap of dust like a cloud bank.
In older versions of the golem story, when the monster got out of control, which he did by murdering and rampaging rather than frying up too much food, Rabbi Judah changed the word "emet" to "met," which is Hebrew for "death," and the golem collapsed in a heap of dust.
Alex Werner, curator of the first major museum show on Charles Dickens for more than 40 years, says one of his favourite exhibits is a small drawing that it would be easy for visitors to overlook: it shows a large heap of dust through which women are sifting in the hope of finding bits of metal or bone or anything else they can sell.
It differs from mere alteration, such as the browning of an autumn leaf, where an identifiable material substratum persists, and from generation and corruption, such as the transformation of an olive seed into a tree or the decay of a rose into a heap of dust, where no identifiable material substratum persists.
