In the sixth paragraph, there is a zooming motion similar to the olympic zoom in the following paragraph from the geese scenario to the hands and the apartment scenario to the cigarettes (hands again)
The visual aspect of the composition and its effects can be analyzed with respect to shifts in scale, as is sometimes done in the case of the visual media of moving pictures. In the case of a literary text, however, one will have to add an extra level besides the purely visual: abstract (and not primarily figurative) meaning. To cover the difference in scale we need five levels of focus effecting different degrees of intimacy: body part sized (the close-up); body sized; interior – the size of a room; exterior – larger than the confined space of a room; and abstract meaning (no size, or: ‘larger than life’). Scale: Abstract Exterior Interior Body Body part The Olympus has its general focus at the body part scale – descriptions of touching involving hair, hands and faces signifying the (not purely physical) 70
This rule is broken on three occasions. In the very first sentence, there is a shift in scale from the body part sized “hair” that is being touched to an exterior view of the location. This perspective helps establish the distinction between the HeC space and the HoC space: the locative space-builder “by the river” sets up a space that is distinguished from the space introduced in the next sentence by the space-builder “in our apartment”. Extreme shifts like these effect hightened attention. In the seventh paragraph, there is a sequence of dramatic shifts: the olympic viewpoint (OV) moves from body sized scale (lingering from the fifth paragraph) to an exterior view with abstract meaning (the geese by the river), down to body part scale again (hands), up to the interior (C’s apartment), and zooms in, first on the bodies lying there (body size) and then the cigarettes (body part size).