Austerlitz

by W.G. Sebald

private obscurity and ordinary silence that will befall most of us.

alone against the Flemish sky. When I entered the great hall

solitary travellers, who so often pass days on end in uninterrupted silence, are glad to be spoken to.

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.

No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.

‘I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.’

months

in McDonald’s

seems incongruous around such timeless reflections

like a beetle in his black tail-coat,

their occupants hanging out of the windows like bunches of grapes,

was the instant change to driving on the right.

???

Stromovka Park is over there, would you walk there for me sometimes? I have loved that beautiful place so much.

ramp into a labyrinth

little throats