Obscure day. It is often muggy in the Thames Valley. Return home late at night, or go out to bid visitors goodbye, and the air is moist; the grass, like the tarmac, covered in a layer of moisture. I am here for – how long? – today? tomorrow? – working on this and that. The Rings of Saturn accompanies me and as I began to read this morning, having given up the letter I was trying to write, it is as though it had set back in me that backdrop against which memories can come into appearance.
Set it back: if I call it forgetting, this is in no way to be understood as the opposite of memory, but rather, a kind of patina, an encrustation which ages each memory, bringing it forward, already old, with the whole of the past. Reading, the day loses its hold on time and seems to fall indifferently into the past. Counter-day, how is I have always known you by what failed to happen?
Obscurity: Sebald’s East Anglia is my Berkshire, but neither is itself. Time’s arrow is lost in the sand; every day happens at once. How old am I? I lived in the same house when I was fifteen, and then again when I was thirty. How old am I now? Five more years have passed, but no time has passed.
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