Perhaps there were other details that I missed, because as she spoke I found myself struggling to accept the idea that I was about to hand over the single meaningful object in my life as a writer, the lone physical representation of all that was otherwise weightless and intangible, to this waif who might sit at it from time to time as if at a paternal altar.
-- Narrator (Part I: All Rise paragraph 47)

Importance: Nadia thinks that Leah, the girl who claimed to be the daughter of Daniel, was not worthy of the desk that had belonged to her father. At the same time she realized how important a fixture the desk had become in her writing.

I championed the writer’s freedom — to create, to alter and amend, to collapse and expand, to ascribe meaning, to design, to perform, to affect, to choose a life, to experiment, and on and on — and quoted Henry James on...
-- Narrator (Part I: All Rise paragraph 56)