Eric Maas’s Reviews > The Rings of Saturn > Status Update

7. Dunwich heath – Marsh Acres, Middleton – A Berlin childhood – Exile in England – Dreams, elective affinities, correspondences – Two strange stories – Through the rainforest

First bit of tenderness comes from Anne Beresford. It is most welcome even if it is but a dream. Possibly, imagination is where we need to turn to for comfort. All the rest remains saturnal grit and dust…

Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our own work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life. (p. 182)

No last sigh, no last words were to be heard, nor the last despairing plea: Lend me a looking-glass; if that her breath will mist or stain the stone, why then she lives. No, nothing. Nothing but dead silence. (p. 174/175)

6. The bridge over the Blythe – The Chinese court train – The Taiping rebellion and the opening of China – Destruction of the garden of Yuan Ming Yuan – The end of Emperor Hsien-feng – The Disaster Empire Tz’u-hsi – Mysteries of power – The town beneath the sea – Poor Algernon

So many shameful episodes at the expense of millions of human beings. King Leopold whitewashing the exploitation and deaths of so many indigenous Congolese is outrageous.

All pages in the book are black, but the stories are told so dryly, no dramatization whatsoever. If you want to be indignant, you’ll have to sort that out on your own…

5. Conrad and Casement – The Boy Teodor – Exile in Volgda – Nowofastów – Death and internment of Apollo Korzeniowski – Sea- and love-life – A winter journey – The heart of darkness – The panorama of Waterloo – Casement, the space economy and the Irish question – Casement tried and executed for treason

4. The Battle of Sole Bay – Nightfall – Station Road on The Hague – Mauritshuis – Scheveningen – The tomb of St Sebolt – Schiphol airport – The invisibility of man – The Sailor’s Reading Room - Pictures from the Great War – The concentration camp at Jasenovac on the Sava

[while reading the Southwold patrol ship’s log] Every thing I decipher one of these entries I am astounded that a tail that had long since vanished from the air or the water remains visible here on the paper. (p. 93)

The traces we leave and choose to leave behind, for better and for worse…

…it is as though there were no people, only the things they have made and in which they are hiding. One sees the places where they live and the roads that link then, one see the smoke riding from there houses and factories, one sees the vehicles in which they sit, but one are not the people themselves. And yet they are present everywhere upon the face of the earth… (p. 91)

…the bones of the exemplary dead man, the harbinger of a time when the years will be wiped from or eyes and there will be no more grief, or pain, of wiping and wailing. (p. 88)