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It Makes One’s Head Heavy And Giddy, As If One Were Not Looking Back Down The Receding Perspectives Of Time But Rather Down On The Earth From A Great Height, From One Of Those Towers Whose Tops Are Lost To View In The Clouds

-W. G. Sebald

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It Makes One’s Head

W. G. Sebald

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It Makes One’s Head Heavy And Giddy, As If One Were Not Looking Back Down The Receding Perspectives Of Time But Rather Down On The Earth From A Great Height, From One Of Those Towers Whose Tops Are Lost To View In The Clouds

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As Far As I Know, The Question Of Whether And How It Could Be Strategically Or Morally Justified Was Never The Subject Of Open Debate In Germany After 1945, No Doubt Mainly Because A Nation Which Had Murdered And Worked To Death Millions Of People In Its Camps Could Hardly Call On The Victorious Powers To Explain The Military And Political Logic That Dictated The Destruction Of The German Cities.

How Happily, Said Austerlitz, Have I Sat Over A Book In The Deepening Twilight Until I Could No Longer Make Out The Words And My Mind Began To Wander, And How Secure Have I Felt Seated At The Desk In My House In The Dark Night, Just Watching The Tip Of My Pencil In The Lamplight Following Its Shadow, As If Of Its Own Accord And With Perfect Fidelity, While That Shadow Moved Regularly From Left To Right, Line By Line, Over The Ruled Paper.

It Is A Sore Point, Because You Do Have Advantages If You Have Access To More Than One Language. You Also Have Problems, Because On Bad Days You Don't Trust Yourself, Either In Your First Or Your Second Language, And So You Feel Like A Complete Halfwit.

To Set One's Name To A Work Gives No One A Title To Be Remembered, For Who Knows How Many Of The Best Of Men Have Gone Without A Trace? The Iniquity Of Oblivion Blindly Scatters Her Poppyseed And When Wretchedness Falls Upon Us One Summer's Day Like Snow, All We Wish For Is To Be Forgotten.

In My Photographic Work I Was Always Especially Entranced... By The Moment When The Shadows Of Reality, So To Speak, Emerge Out Of Nothing On The Exposed Paper, As Memories Do In The Middle Of The Night, Darkening Again If You Try To Cling To Them.

I Believe That The Black-and-white Photograph, Or Rather The Gray Zones In The Black-and-white Photograph, Stand For This Territory That Is Located Between Life And Death.

Black And White

I Feel More And More As If Time Did Not Exist At All... Only Various Spaces Interlocking According To The Rules Of A Higher Form Of Stereometry[the Geometric Measurement Of Solid Bodies], Between Which The Living And The Dead Can Move Back And Forth As They Like, And The Longer I Think About It The More It Seems To Me That We Who Are Still Alive Are Unreal In The Eyes Of The Dead.

I Wonder Now Whether Inner Coldness And Desolation May Not Be The Pre-condition For Making The World Believe, By A Kind Of Fraudulent Showmanship, That One's Own Wretched Heart Is Still Aglow.

Tiny Details Imperceptible To Us Decide Everything!

The Seasons And The Years Came And Went...and Always...one Was, As The Crow Flies, About 2,000 Km Away - But From Where? - And Day By Day Hour By Hour, With Every Beat Of The Pulse, One Lost More And More Of One's Qualities, Became Less Comprehensible To Oneself, Increasingly Abstract.

And So They Are Ever Returning To Us, The Dead. At Times They Come Back From The Ice More Than Seven Decades Later And Are Found At The Edge Of The Moraine, A Few Polished Bones And A Pair Of Hobnailed Boots.

I Have Always Kept Ducks, Even As A Child, And The Colours Of Their Plumage, In Particular The Dark Green And Snow White, Seemed To Me The Only Possible Answer To The Questions That Are On My Mind.

It Seems To Me Then As If All The Moments Of Our Life Occupy The Same Space, As If Future Events Already Existed And Were Only Waiting For Us To Find Our Way To Them At Last, Just As When We Have Accepted An Invitation We Duly Arrive In A Certain House At A Given Time.

How Far, In Any Case, Must One Go Back To Find The Beginning?

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Human Civilization Has Been No More Than A Strange Luminescence Growing More Intense By The Hour, Of Which No One Can Say When It Will Begin To Wane And When It Will Fade Away.

Otherwise, All I Remember Of The Denizens Of The Nocturama Is That Several Of Them Had Strikingly Large Eyes, And The Fixed Inquiring Gaze Found In Certain Painters And Philosophers Who Seek To Penetrate The Darkness Which Surrounds Us Purely By Means Of Looking And Thinking.

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Everything Our Civilization Has Produced Is Entombed.

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... The Current Of Time Slowing Down In The Gravitational Field Of Oblivion.

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.

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Only In The Books Written In Earlier Times Did She Sometimes Think She Found Some Faint Idea Of What It Might Be Like To Be Alive.

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It Makes One’s Head Heavy And Giddy, As If One Were Not Looking Back Down The Receding Perspectives Of Time But Rather Down On The Earth From A Great Height, From One Of Those Towers Whose Tops Are Lost To View In The Clouds

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At The Time I Could No More Believe My Eyes Than Now I Can Trust My Memory.

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This Then, I Thought, As I Looked Round About Me, Is The Representation Of History. It Requires A Falsification Of Perspective. We, The Survivors, See Everything From Above, See Everything At Once, And Still We Do Not Know How It Was.

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 Capital Amassed In The Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries Through Various Forms Of Slave Economy Is Still In Circulation, Said De Jong, Still Bearing Interest, Increasing Many Times Over And Continually Burgeoning Anew.

We Take Almost All The Decisive Steps In Our Lives As A Result Of Slight Inner Adjustments Of Which We Are Barely Conscious.

Time, That Most Abstract Of Humanity's Homes.

No One Can Explain Exactly What Happens Within Us When The Doors Behind Which Our Childhood Terrors Lurk Are Flung Open.

The More Images I Gathered From The Past, I Said, The More Unlikely It Seemed To Me That The Past Had Actually Happened In This Or That Way, For Nothing About It Could Be Called Normal: Most Of It Was Absurd, And If Not Absurd, Then Appalling.

Like Our Bodies And Like Our Desires, The Machines We Have Devised Are Possessed Of A Heart Which Is Slowly Reduced To Embers.

I Suppose It Is Submerged Realities That Give To Dreams Their Curious Air Of Hyper-reality. But Perhaps There Is Something Else As Well, Something Nebulous, Gauze-like, Through Which Everything One Sees In A Dream Seems, Paradoxically, Much Clearer. A Pond Becomes A Lake, A Breeze Becomes A Storm, A Handful Of Dust Is A Desert, A Grain Of Sulphur In The Blood Is A Volcanic Inferno. What Manner Of Theater Is It, In Which We Are At Once Playwright, Actor, Stage Manager, Scene Painter And Audience?

I Felt That The Decrepit State Of These Once Magnificent Buildings, With Their Broken Gutters, Walls Blackened By Rainwater, Crumbling Plaster Revealing The Coarse Masonry Beneath It, Windows Boarded Up Or Clad With Corrugated Iron, Precisely Reflected My Own State Of Mind.

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