Status Updates From Pierścienie Saturna

I have become almost invisible, to some extent like a dead man. Perhaps that is why it appears to me that this world which I have very nearly left behind is shrouded in some peculiar mystery. (p. 255)

Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life. How often this has caused me to feel that my memories, and the labours expended in writing them down are all part of the same humiliating and, at bottom, contemptible business! And yet, what would we be without memory? (p. 255)

Is it not wrong to squander one’s chance of happiness in order to indulge a talent? Will what I have written survive beyond the grave? Will there be anyone able to comprehend it in a world the very foundations of which are changed? — The Vicomte wrote these words in 1822. (p. 253)

Is it not wrong to squander one’s chance of happiness in order to indulge a talent? Will what I have written survive beyond the grave? Will there be anyone able to comprehend it in a world the very foundations of which are changed? — The Chicken wrote these words in 1822. (p. 253)

8 … The entrepreneurial spirit and the cult of the pheasant – Through the desert – Secret weapons of destruction – In another country

8. A conversation about sugar – Boulge Park – The FitzGeralds – The Bredford nursery – Edward FitzGerald’s literary ventures – A Magic Shadow-Show – Loss of a friend – Year’s end – Last journey, summer landscape, tears of happiness – A game of dominoes – An Irish memory – On the history of the civil war – Arson, impoverishment and decline – Catherine of Siena –…

…the closer I came, the more any notion of a mysterious idle of the dead receded, and the more I imagined myself amidst the remains of it civilization after its extinction in some future catastrophe. (p. 237)

With each step that I took, the emptiness within and the emptiness without grew ever greater and the silence more profound. (p. 234)

Oh, for the countless things one fails to do! (p221)

All of us are fantasists, ill-equipped for life, the children as much as myself. It seems to me sometimes that we never got used to being in this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder. (p220)

Like giant children under an evil spell, the three unmarried daughters, much of an age, sat on the floor amidst these mountains of material, working away and only rarely breathing a word to each other. (p. 22)

Without a heads up, suddenly Sebald seems to drag us into something that has the enchanting tone of a tale…

What work they did always had about it something aimless and meaningless and seemed not so much part of a daily routine as an expression of a deeply engrained distress. (p. 211)

For in and out, above, about, below,
‘Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-Show,
Play’d in a Box whose Candle is the Sun,
Round which the Phantom Figures come and go.
Omar Khayyam – Rubaiyat
Translated by Edward FitzGerald