Austerlitz

by W.G. Sebald

A literary tour de force’

It is often our mightiest projects, he suggests, that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity.

Sebald borrowed this habit of repetitive attribution from the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, who also influenced Sebald’s diction of extremism.

Sturm und drang

Primo Levi

There is also guilt at the idea that the dead are at our mercy, that we can choose to remember or forget them.

This is finely caught by Theodor Adorno, in an essay on Mahler, written in 1936: ‘So the memory is the only help that is left to them [the dead]. They pass away into it, and if every deceased person is like someone who was murdered by the living, so he is also like someone whose life they must save, without knowing whether the effort will survive.’*

Remember me. Being in nowhen which is a fate worse than death - Twilight in the Land of Nowhen

Barthes calls photographers ‘agents of death’, because they freeze the subject and the moment into finitude.

And indeed, said Austerlitz after a while, to this day there is something illusionistic and illusory about the relationship of time and space as we experience it in travelling, which is why whenever we come home from elsewhere we never feel quite sure if we have really been abroad.

Metallic Uterus

Someone, he added, ought to draw up a catalogue of types of buildings, listed in order of size, and it would be immediately obvious that domestic buildings of less than normal size – the little cottage in the fields, the hermitage, the lock-keeper’s lodge, the pavilion for viewing the landscape, the children’s bothy in the garden – are those that offer us at least a semblance of peace, whereas no one in his right mind could truthfully say that he liked a vast edifice such as the Palace of Justice on the old Gallows Hill in Brussels.

At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.

the darkness does not lift but becomes yet heavier as I think how little we can hold in mind, how everything is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how the world is, as it were, draining itself, in that the history of countless places and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard, never described or passed on.

Le Jardin des Plantes,

just as our best-laid plans, said Austerlitz, as I still remember, always turn into the exact opposite when they are put into practice.

He had quite often found himself in the grip of dangerous and entirely incomprehensible currents of emotion in the Parisian railway stations, which, he said, he regarded as places marked by both blissful happiness and profound misfortune.

a man locked into the glaring clarity of his logical thinking as inextricably as into his confused emotions,

Our concern with history, so Hilary’s thesis ran, is a concern with pre-formed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.

I remember, said Austerlitz, how Alphonso once told his great-nephew and me that everything was fading before our eyes, and that many of the loveliest of colours had already disappeared, or existed only where no one saw them, in the submarine gardens fathoms deep below the surface of the sea.

As Alphonso had told him, said Austerlitz, there is really no reason to suppose that lesser beings are devoid of sentient life.

We are not alone in dreaming at night for, quite apart from dogs and other domestic creatures whose emotions have been bound up with ours for many thousands of years, the smaller mammals such as mice and moles also live in a world that exists only in their minds whilst they are asleep, as we can detect from their eye movements, and who knows, said Austerlitz, perhaps moths dream as well, perhaps a lettuce in the garden dreams as it looks up at the moon by night.

How often I stood by the open window, unable to think coherently in the face of this spectacle, which was never the same twice.

Windows

strangely – I remember this well – it was the very evanescence of those visions that gave me, at the time, something like a sense of eternity.

Time, said Austerlitz in the observation room in Greenwich, was by far the most artificial of all our inventions,

if Newton really thought that time was a river like the Thames, then where is its source and into what sea does it finally flow?

In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it?

It is not so long ago, after all, that it began spreading out over everything.

TIME

The dead are outside time, the dying and all the sick at home or in hospitals, and they are not the only ones, for a certain degree of personal misfortune is enough to cut us off from the past and the future.

Hilary remarked on the curious confusion of emotions affecting even a historian in a room like this, sealed away so long from the flow of the hours and days and the succession of the generations.

On preservation and antiques

often took me a whole day to compose a single sentence, and no sooner had I thought such a sentence out, with the greatest effort, and written it down, than I saw the awkward falsity of my constructions and the inadequacy of all the words I had employed.

Like a tightrope walker who has forgotten how to put one foot in front of the other, all I felt was the swaying of the precarious structure on which I stood, stricken with terror at the realization that the ends of the balancing pole gleaming far out on the edges of my field of vision were no longer my guiding lights, as before, but malignant enticements to me to cast myself into the depths.

When you forget how to do the one thing you thought you knew how to

the endless possibilities of language, to which I could once safely abandon myself,

If language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares, nooks and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time while others have been torn down, cleaned up and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching further and further into the surrounding country, then I was like a man who has been abroad a long time and cannot find his way through this urban sprawl any more, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or what a back yard is, or a street junction, an avenue or a bridge.

I could not even understand what I myself had written in the past – perhaps I could understand that least of all.

It was then, after my work of destruction in the garden and when I had turned out my house, that I began my nocturnal wanderings through London, to escape the insomnia which increasingly tormented me.

Acquainted with the night - Robert Frost

Londoners of all ages lie in their beds in those countless buildings in Greenwich, Bayswater or Kensington, under a safe roof, as they suppose, while really they are only stretched out with their faces turned to the earth in fear, like travellers of the past resting on their way through the desert.

We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.

I was always refining my defensive reactions, creating a kind of quarantine or immune system which, as I maintained my existence in a smaller and smaller space, protected me from anything that could be connected in any way, however distant, with my own early history.

When we had parted I sat for an hour on a bench in Russell Square under the tall plane trees, which were still leafless.

A bench in Russell Square. So long.

because he refused, for as long as was humanly possible, to give up his belief that the law would protect a man.