In the simplest description of this book, W.G. Sebald takes a long walk through East Anglia. Yet his work is remarkable because it moves beyond mere memoir of a German flâneur in England. Often when I try to write, I feel a constant urge to connect and intersect seemingly nonconnectable ideas — grainy, distant memories, historical aspects of my immediate place, travel of the solitary walker, topics of science and nature, astronomy, physics, collective culture in gastronomy — and my enjoyable challenge is melding ideas that seem tenuous or irrelevant to the reader but wholly connected to me in my mind. Sebald handles this business seemingly with ease, as when he gazes at an iron bridge across the river Blyth in one moment, and in the next contemplates 3-mile-long heraldic Chinese dragons carrying the palaces of the gods on their backs. In this case, the two disparate ideas are connected by place: the possible intended destination of the train, years ago, to the Palace in Peking. In effortless mental travel, Sebald stands in an otherwise featureless, muddy wasteland and injects beautiful, fascinating meaning. Sebald also understood the absurdity of connecting one thing to another in our complex modern society, but nonetheless he seems to have been preoccupied with this absurdity. Especially in Europe, we are surrounded by old structures and streets in which untold histories have taken place, much of them forgotten forever. But occasionally a learned writer arrives, one with a deep sense of history (yet who can write something better than the purposefully obfuscated prose of an academic), who brings to life the stories of obscure personalities who walked the halls of an abandoned palace, or manicured a now abandoned garden, or fought an unspeakably bloody naval battle in a now tranquil sea bay.
The photography peppered in the book lacks detail, the photos being grainy black and white depictions of a place of which it is the job of Sebald´s writing to color, not the camera itself. It seems to me that the photos are not meant to stand by themselves, rather they act as a primer for a wild cerebral ride of Sebald´s words. I also have a great interest in photography, but it occupies an entirely different part of my mind than writing. I often find the urge to include photos not to supplement an article, but to complement it in such a way as to introduce an idea in which the words create the complete picture. It is because of this that I find fascinating the simple portraits of authors buried in bookends, or Sebald´s photos of a featureless mudflat or an abandoned window and desk. A pile of dead herring in Lowestoft is expounded upon with stories of glowing fish carcasses and still scenes of spontaneous mass graves in the woods.
It is obvious that Sebald is saturated in melancholy; he writes with gusto of destroyed lives, mental illness, abandoned beauty and opportunity, desperation and disease, forgotten genocides. The day is always at an end, the weather is always turning grey and colder. But in these stories that connect the past to immediate present time and place, I find great inspiration, particularly in my private mental travel, because to me the clearest meaning rarely comes from packaged happy notes or brochure-style travel articles that use words like “blessing” and “incredible” and “amazing” so often until they are castrated and stripped of any meaning. Perhaps Sebald prefers to swim in a somber environment to draw his connections. I remember one of the most creatively productive times of my life was when I lived a summer in the dreary Olympic National Park, a place on the coast where the sun never shined and long moss grew from the old trees, and I would sit alone at the beach between giant pieces of driftwood. I would look out to the grey and brown sea and my mind would race.
It has been said that the tangents and complex mental trails that Sebald leads the reader through often seem to have no point; they seem just to end. But I find that each of these trails of the mind do not end, rather they can continue indefinitely, and his maddening habit of following his own mind´s connections, however absurd they may appear, make perfect sense if I allow them to happen.
the back mezzanine 